Laura's admirer, Tito di San Pietro, was a bold and even reckless player and would often lose sums he could ill afford. (That was not his real name, but I call him that since his own is famous in Florentine history.) He was a good-looking youth, neither short nor tall, with fine black eyes, thick black hair brushed back from his forehead and shining with oil, an olive skin, and features of classical regularity.
He was poor and he had some vague occupation, which did not seem to interfere with his amusements, but he was always beautifully dressed.
No one quite knew where he lived, in a furnished room perhaps or in the attic of some relation; and all that remained of his ancestors' great possessions was a Cinquecento villa about thirty miles from the city.
I never saw it, but I was told that it was of amazing beauty, with a great neglected garden of cypresses and live oaks, overgrown borders of box, terraces, artificial grottoes, and crumbling statues.
His widowed father, the count, lived there alone and subsisted on the wine he made from the vines of the small property he still owned and the oil from his olive trees.
He seldom came to Florence, so I never met him, but Charley Harding knew him fairly well.
'He's a perfect specimen of the Tuscan nobleman of the old school,' he said.
'He was in the diplomatic service in his youth and he knows the world.
He has beautiful manners and such an air, you almost feel he's doing you a favour when he says how d'you do to you.
He's a brilliant talker.
Of course he hasn't a penny, he squandered the little he inherited on gambling and women, but he bears his poverty with great dignity.
He acts as though money were something beneath his notice.'
'What sort of age is he?' I asked.
'Fifty, I should say, but he's still the handsomest man I've ever seen in my life.'
'Oh?'
'You describe him, Bessie.
When he first came here he made a pass at Bessie.
I've never been quite sure how far it went.'
'Don't be a fool, Charley,' Mrs Harding laughed.
She gave him the sort of look a woman gives her husband when she has been married to him many years and is quite satisfied with him.
'He's very attractive to women and he knows it,' she said.
'When he talks to you he gives you the impression that you're the only woman in the world and of course it's flattering.
But it's only a game and a woman would have to be a perfect fool to take him seriously.
He is very handsome.
Tall and spare and he holds himself well.
He has great dark liquid eyes, like the boy's; his hair is snow-white, but very thick still, and the contrast with his bronzed, young face is really breath-taking.
He has a ravaged, rather battered look, but at the same time a look of such distinction, it's really quite incredibly romantic'
'He also has his great dark liquid eyes on the main chance,' said Charley Harding dryly.
'And he'll never let Tito marry a girl who has no more money than Laura.'
'She has about five thousand dollars a year of her own,' said Bessie. 'And she'll get that much more when her mother dies.'
'Her mother can live for another thirty years, and five thousand a year won't go far to keep a husband, a father, and two or three children, and restore a ruined villa with practically not a stick of furniture in it.'
'I think the boy's desperately in love with her.'
'How old is he?' I asked.
'Twenty-six.'
A few days after this Charley, on coming back to lunch, since for once we were lunching by ourselves, told me that he had run across Mrs Clayton in the Via Tornabuoni and she had said that she and Laura were driving out that afternoon with Tito to meet his father and see the villa.
'What d'you suppose that means?' asked Bessie.
'My guess is that Tito is taking Laura to be inspected by his old man, and if he approves he's going to ask her to marry him.'
'And will he approve?'
'Not on your life.'
But Charley was wrong.
After the two women had been shown over the house they were taken for a walk round the garden.
Without exactly knowing how it had happened Mrs Clayton found herself alone in an alley with the old count.
She spoke no Italian, but he had been an attache in London and his English was tolerable.
'Your daughter is charming, Mrs Clayton,' he said.
'I am not surprised that my Tito has fallen in love with her.'
Mrs Clayton was no fool and it may be that she too had guessed why the young man had asked them to go and see the ancestral villa.
'Young Italians are very impressionable.
Laura is sensible enough not to take their attention too seriously.'
'I was hoping she was not quite indifferent to the boy.'
'I have no reason to believe that she likes him any more than any other of the young men who dance with her,' Mrs Clayton answered somewhat coldly.