ten in the morning
He was very willing to see more of her , if she wished ; but with the rain beginning to fall more thick and chill in the darkening street , he could have postponed their next meeting till a pleasanter evening without great self-denial . He felt a little twinge of rheumatism in his shoulder when he got into his room , for your room in a Florentine hotel is always some degrees colder than outdoors , unless you have fire in it ; and with the sun shining on his windows when he went out after lunch , it had seemed to Colville ridiculous to have his morning fire kept up . The sun was what he had taken the room for . It was in it , the landlord assured him , from ten in the morning till four in the afternoon ; and so , in fact , it was , when it shone ; but even then it was not fully in it , but had a trick of looking in at the sides of the window , and painting the chamber wall with a delusive glow . Colville raked away the ashes of his fire-place , and throwing on two or three fagots of broom and pine sprays , he had a blaze that would be very pretty to dress by after dinner , but that gave out no warmth for the present . He left it , and went down to the reading-room , as it was labelled over the door , in homage to a predominance of English-speaking people among the guests ; but there was no fire there ; that was kindled only by request , and he shivered at the bare aspect of the apartment , with its cold piano , its locked bookcases , and its table , where the London _ Times _ , the _ Neue Freie Presse _ of Vienna , and the _ Italie _ of Rome exposed their titles , one just beyond the margin of the other . He turned from the door and went into the dining-room , where the stove was ostentatiously roaring over its small logs and its lozenges of peat , But even here the fire had been so recently lighted that the warmth was potential rather than actual .