He threw a loose overcoat over his shoulders without passing his arms through the sleeves, and went out into the street.

Glancing up at the windows of his house opposite, he saw that the lights were burning brightly, and he guessed that his wife and daughter were waiting for him before sitting down to supper.
"Let them wait," he muttered with a surly grin, as he put out the taper and went down the street in the opposite direction.
He turned the street corner by the dark Palazzo Antici Mattei, and threaded the narrow streets towards the Pantheon and the Piazza Sant' Eustachio.

The weather had changed, and the damp south-east wind was blowing fiercely behind him.

The pavement was wet and slippery with the strange thin coating of greasy mud which sometimes appears suddenly in Rome even when it has not rained.

The insufficient gas lamps flickered in the wind as though they would go out, and the few pedestrians who hurried along clung closely to the wall as though it offered them some protection from the moist scirocco.