I drew out my watch; we
had long overstayed our time, for we were to lunch at the Sibylla in
Tivoli. We walked slowly to the entrance where Serafino waited for us
with the carriage. He was smoking a pipe, calm and happy, and in
companionable conversation with the driver.
At a table near the Temple of Vesta here on the Castro Vetere, the
waterfalls below us, Horace's Villa above us, we dined and became happy
again.
When we got back to the pension Uncle Tom was there to greet us and to
receive Isabel's kiss upon a mischievously yielded cheek, and to hear
her rapturous account of the afternoon.
And I went forth with little Reverdy in the Borghese Gardens; afterwards
to continue my studies of the etchings of Piranesi.
CHAPTER LIV
Isabel now took Reverdy into her heart with an ardor that could not be
mistaken. She often went to bring him from school to the pension. She
took him in walks about the broken columns of the Forum. They clambered
together over the galleries of the Coliseum and to the heights of the
Palatine, exploring the ruins of the palaces of the Cesar's. They had
walked out to the Appian Way, and gone to listen to the merles and the
golden wrens among the cypresses of the Protestant cemetery.
Reverdy had begun to call Isabel "Mamma Isabel" and Isabel addressed him
as "son.
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