cursions through the hot beauty of the Italian afternoons,
eastward to Genoa, westward to Sestri and northward towards Montallegro.
Then they went up to the summit of the Monte de Porto Fino and Sir Isaac
descended and walked about and looked at the view and praised Bergener.
After that he was encouraged to visit the gracious old monastery that
overhangs the road to Porto Fino.

At first Lady Harman did her duty of control and association with an
apathetic resignation. This had to go on--for eight or ten years. Then
her imagination began to stir again. There came a friendly letter from
Mr. Brumley and she answered with a description of the colour of the sea
and the charm and wonder of its tideless shore. The three elder children
wrote queer little letters and she answered them. She went into Rapallo
and got herself a carriageful of Tauchnitz books....

That visit to the monastery on the Porto Fino road was like a pleasant
little glimpse into the brighter realities of the Middle Ages. The
place, which is used as a home of rest for convalescent Carthusians,
chanced to be quite empty and deserted; the Bavarian rang a jangling
bell again and again and at last gained the attention of an old gardener
working in the vineyard above, an unkempt, unshaven, ungainly creature
dressed in scarce decent rags of brown, who was yet courteous-minded
and, albeit crack-voiced, with his yellow-fanged mouth full of gracious
polysyllables. He hobbled off to get a key and returned through the
still heat of the cobbled yard outside the monastery gates, and took
them into cool airy rooms and showed them clean and simple cells in
shady corridors, and a delightful orangery, and led them to a beautiful
terrace that looked out upon the glowing quivering sea. And he became
very anxious to tell them something about "Francesco"; they could not
understand him until the doctor caught "Battaglia" and "Pavia" and had
an inspiration. Francis the First, he explained in clumsy but
understandable English, slept here, when he was a prisoner of the
Emperor and all was lost but honour. They looked at the slender pillars
and graceful archings about them.

"Chust as it was now," the young doctor said, his imagination touched
for a moment by mere unscientific things....

They returned to their dependance in a state of mutual contentment, Sir
Isaac scarcely tired, and Lady Harman ran upstairs to change her dusty
dress for a fresher muslin, while he went upon the d