of it
chiefly as the place where people had suffered. This was what came to
her in the starved churches, where the marble columns, transferred from
pagan ruins, seemed to offer her a companionship in endurance and the
musty incense to be a compound of long-unanswered prayers. There was
no gentler nor less consistent heretic than Isabel; the firmest of
worshippers, gazing at dark altar-pictures or clustered candles, could
not have felt more intimately the suggestiveness of these objects nor
have been more liable at such moments to a spiritual visitation. Pansy,
as we know, was almost always her companion, and of late the Countess
Gemini, balancing a pink parasol, had lent brilliancy to their equipage;
but she still occasionally found herself alone when it suited her
mood and where it suited the place. On such occasions she had several
resorts; the most accessible of which perhaps was a seat on the low
parapet which edges the wide grassy space before the high, cold front
of Saint John Lateran, whence you look across the Campagna at the
far-trailing outline of the Alban Mount and at that mighty plain,
between, which is still so full of all that has passed from it. After
the departure of her cousin and his companions she roamed more than
usual; she carried her sombre spirit from one familiar shrine to the
other. Even when Pansy and the Countess were with her she felt the touch
of a vanished world. The carriage, leaving the walls of Rome behind,
rolled through narrow lanes where the wild honeysuckle had begun to
tangle itself in the hedges, or waited for her in quiet places where
the fields lay near, while she strolled further and further over the
flower-freckled turf, or sat on a stone that had once had a use and
gazed through the veil of her personal sadness at the splendid sadness
of the scene--at the dense, warm light, the far gradations and soft
confusions of colour, the motionless shepherds in lonely attitudes, the
hills where the cloud-shadows had the lightness of a blush.

On the afternoon I began with speaking of, she had taken a resolution
not to think of Madame Merle; but the resolution proved vain, and this
lady's image hovered constantly before her. She asked herself, with an
almost childlike horror of the supposition, whether to this intimate
friend of several years the great historical epithet of wicked were
to be applied. She knew the idea only by the Bible and other literary
works; to the best of her belief