pect. “If we all go, we shall doubtless all meet there sooner or later.” And she turned to wave away a beggar, whose prayers she would have considered it almost wicked to gratify.
“I think it will be about half-past ten,” said Anne to Curatulo.
“Thank you,” he murmured, holding out his hand; and when she put hers into it he kissed her fingers quickly, and was gone.
Anne drew back into the shadow as her car started rapidly homewards. The ceremony at St. Peter’s had passed before her as a thing in a dream, and as in a dream Rome slid by the car window. Narrow and disheveled streets that surround the Castel St. Angelo, a stark, gaunt pile of masonry that reared itself black against a pallid sky, the crossing of the bridge where Bernini’s angels pose in wind-blown attitudes over the Tiber’s faded waters, the plunge again into more and darker streets, and the confused and precarious threading of their way among a squalid and excitable crowd of people toward the final ascent in quietness as they drove under the trees through the avenue to the portone of their own palace, were all things seen as in a dream, but a dream in which impressions are mysteriously significant, pregnant as though with unexplained meaning and event.
69
