ting on the aesthetic side in the old days and
was not surprised; sometimes she laughed at the young man's hesitating
delicate little jests and sometimes she didn't, and sometimes she seemed
quite lost to the art about them in the contemplation of the dresses of
the other visitors.

At Rome the young man was with them intermittently. A rather "touristy"
friend of his took him away at times. He complained comically to Miss
Winchelsea. "I have only two short weeks in Rome," he said, "and my
friend Leonard wants to spend a whole day at Tivoli, looking at a
waterfall."

"What is your friend Leonard?" asked Miss Winchelsea abruptly.

"He's the most enthusiastic pedestrian I ever met," the young man
replied, amusingly, but a little unsatisfactorily, Miss Winchelsea
thought. They had some glorious times, and Fanny could not think what
they would have done without him. Miss Winchelsea's interest and
Fanny's enormous capacity for admiration were insatiable. They never
flagged--through pictures and sculpture galleries, immense crowded
churches, ruins and museums, Judas trees and prickly pears, wine carts
and palaces, they admired their way unflinchingly. They never saw a
stone pine or a eucalyptus but they named and admired it; they never
glimpsed Soracte but they exclaimed. Their common ways were made
wonderful by imaginative play. "Here Caesar may have walked," they would
say. "Raphael may have seen Soracte from this very point." They happened
on the tomb of Bibulus. "Old Bibulus," said the young man. "The oldest
monument of Republican Rome!" said Miss Winchelsea.

"I'm dreadfully stupid," said Fanny, "but who WAS Bibulus?"

There was a curious little pause.

"Wasn't he the person who built the wall?" said Helen.

The young man glanced quickly at her and laughed. "That was Balbus," he
said. Helen reddened, but neither he nor Miss Winchelsea threw any light
upon Fanny's ignorance about Bibulus.

Helen was more taciturn than the other three, but then she was always
taciturn, and usually she took care of the tram tickets and things like
that, or kept her eye on them if the young man took them, and told him
where they were when he wanted them. Glorious times they had, these
young people, in that pale brown cleanly city of memories that was once
the world. Their only sorrow was the shortness of the time. They said
indeed that the electric trams and the '70 buildings, and that criminal
advertisement that glares upon the Foru