brick walks towards the garden.
From the stable the scent of horses and fresh straw blew towards her,
mingling with the perfume of the June roses. This, too, meant home. The
stable was at the foot of the garden. Ever since she could remember,
when the wind was due west, the scent of "horse" had mingled with the
scent of flowers.

The garden lay in terraces connected by flights of wooden steps. She sat
down on the first flight, between two damask-rose trees, and watched the
swallows wheeling to nest against the dim gold of the sky. A great bush
of calacanthus spread at her feet. She gathered some of the little,
hard, maroon-coloured blossoms, and put them inside the breast of her
gown. They would only give out their full sweetness thus warmed. Their
perfume of strawberries-in-the-sun and fresh vanilla was the very
essence of "home." The _tank-tonk_ of cowbells sounded along the meadow
field. The cows, just milked, were grazing leisurely again. Frogs
crooned softly from the mill-pond. A screech-owl trilled.

The soft, fluctuant ebb and flow of blowing foliage--like an aerial
surge playing along skyey strands--came to her from the lawn above. She
turned and lay at full length in the warm grass--breast to breast with
the earth of home. Her heart beat strong and warm against it--her lips
pressed it. And a strange, tender, universal thrill such as she had
never known, ran through her as she thus clasped and kissed the soil
from which she had sprung, and to which she would one day return....

And suddenly it seemed to her that the greatest gift the gods could send
her would be the wish to write again. Ah, if she, the poet that was her
truest self, could only rise again! It was not a "resurrection" but a
"_risorgimento_" that she longed for. The word came to her with its
memory of Amaldi. But he seemed now only like one of the sad phantoms in
her phantasmal past. Nothing, not even the lost spirit of poetry, seemed
to her so unreal as her past, leaning secure as she now did on the warm
earth of home.

"_Risorgo_.... I rise again...." she murmured, pulling the purple-headed
meadow-grass from its close sheath, and nibbling the yellow-white waxen
stalks absently. That was a home-taste! She stopped thinking more
serious thoughts, to smile down at the nibbled stalk in her hand. "You
taste of childhood...." she said to the blade of grass. Then she rose to
her feet. Charlotte was calling her. As she went towards the house she
mused