d to me you tacitly consented."

"Very tacitly."

"I have never yet really presumed on your consent. But now I would
like you to do this: whenever you catch me in the act of what you call
inconsistency, ask me the meaning of some architectural term. I will
know what you mean; a word to the wise!"

One morning they spent among the ruins of the Palatine, that sunny
desolation of crumbling, over-tangled fragments, half excavated and half
identified, known as the Palace of the Caesars. Nothing in Rome is more
interesting, and no locality has such a confusion of picturesque charms.
It is a vast, rambling garden, where you stumble at every step on the
disinterred bones of the past; where damp, frescoed corridors, relics,
possibly, of Nero's Golden House, serve as gigantic bowers, and where,
in the springtime, you may sit on a Latin inscription, in the shade of
a flowering almond-tree, and admire the composition of the Campagna.
The day left a deep impression on Rowland's mind, partly owing to its
intrinsic sweetness, and partly because his companion, on this occasion,
let her Murray lie unopened for an hour, and asked several questions
irrelevant to the Consuls and the Caesars. She had begun by saying
that it was coming over her, after all, that Rome was a ponderously sad
place. The sirocco was gently blowing, the air was heavy, she was tired,
she looked a little pale.

"Everything," she said, "seems to say that all things are vanity. If one
is doing something, I suppose one feels a certain strength within one to
contradict it. But if one is idle, surely it is depressing to live, year
after year, among the ashes of things that once were mighty. If I were
to remain here I should either become permanently 'low,' as they say, or
I would take refuge in some dogged daily work."

"What work?"

"I would open a school for those beautiful little beggars; though I am
sadly afraid I should never bring myself to scold them."

"I am idle," said Rowland, "and yet I have kept up a certain spirit."

"I don't call you idle," she answered with emphasis.

"It is very good of you. Do you remember our talking about that in
Northampton?"

"During that picnic? Perfectly. Has your coming abroad succeeded, for
yourself, as well as you hoped?"

"I think I may say that it has turned out as well as I expected."

"Are you happy?"

"Don't I look so?"

"So it seems to me. But"--and she hesitated a moment--"I imagine you
look happy whether