Santa Fina and her flowers could not soften or bring peace to his galled soul.

The knowledge that the whole situation was the result of his own doings kept his bitterness always at white heat.

The expression of his thin, haggard face was sardonic, and the groups of simple children, accustomed to ask any stranger for stamps for their collections--a queer habit of the place--turned away from him when once they had looked into his eyes.
He left his motor at the hotel and wandered into the square where the remains of the palazzos of the two great Guelph and Ghibelline families, the Ardinghelli and the Salvucci, frown at one another not fifty yards apart--shorn of their splendors, but the Salvucci still with two towers from which to hurl destruction at their enemies.
John Derringham looked up at the balcony whence Dante had spoken, and round to the Cathedral and the picturesque square.

The few people who passed seemed not in tune with his thoughts, so calm and saintly was the type of their faces--all in keeping with a place where a house of the sixteenth century is considered so aggressively modern as not to be of any interest.

It was too late for him now to go into the Cathedral; nothing but the fortress battlements were possible, and he hobbled there, desiring to see the sunset from its superb elevation.
The gate-keeper, homely and simple, opened to him courteously, and he went in to the first little courtyard, with its fig tree in the middle and old grass-grown well surrounded by olives and lilac bushes; and then he climbed the open stairs to the bastion, from whose battlements there is to be obtained the most perfect view imaginable of the country, the like of which Benozzo Gozzoli loved to paint.
It has not changed in the least since those days, except that the tiles of the roofs, which are now dark gray with age, were then red and brilliant.