m, outraged their aesthetic
feelings unspeakably; but that was only part of the fun. And indeed Rome
is such a wonderful place that it made Miss Winchelsea forget some
of her most carefully prepared enthusiasms at times, and Helen, taken
unawares, would suddenly admit the beauty of unexpected things. Yet
Fanny and Helen would have liked a shop window or so in the English
quarter if Miss Winchelsea's uncompromising hostility to all other
English visitors had not rendered that district impossible.

The intellectual and aesthetic fellowship of Miss Winchelsea and the
scholarly young man passed insensibly towards a deeper feeling.
The exuberant Fanny did her best to keep pace with their recondite
admiration by playing her "beautiful," with vigour, and saying "Oh!
LET'S go," with enormous appetite whenever a new place of interest was
mentioned. But Helen developed a certain want of sympathy towards the
end, that disappointed Miss Winchelsea a little. She refused to "see
anything" in the face of Beatrice Cenci--Shelley's Beatrice Cenci!--in
the Barberini gallery; and one day, when they were deploring the
electric trams, she said rather snappishly that "people must get about
somehow, and it's better than torturing horses up these horrid little
hills." She spoke of the Seven Hills of Rome as "horrid little hills!"

And the day they went on the Palatine--though Miss Winchelsea did not
know of this--she remarked suddenly to Fanny, "Don't hurry like that,
my dear; THEY don't want us to overtake them. And we don't say the right
things for them when we DO get near."

"I wasn't trying to overtake them," said Fanny, slackening her excessive
pace; "I wasn't indeed." And for a minute she was short of breath.

But Miss Winchelsea had come upon happiness. It was only when she came
to look back across an intervening tragedy that she quite realised
how happy she had been, pacing among the cypress-shadowed ruins, and
exchanging the very highest class of information the human mind
can possess, the most refined impressions it is possible to convey.
Insensibly emotion crept into their intercourse, sunning itself
openly and pleasantly at last when Helen's modernity was not too near.
Insensibly their interest drifted from the wonderful associations about
them to their more intimate and personal feelings. In a tentative way
information was supplied; she spoke allusively of her school, of her
examination successes, of her gladness that the days