, but not for some months, for they had
been forced away from Florence by the fierce summer heat, and had spent
some time in Siena and Pistoja, finally taking up their residence in a
cool and secluded nook of the Pistojese Apennines. But when autumn came,
and the colder, mountain breezes began to blow, Mrs. Hartley hastened
her friends back to her comfortable little Florentine villa, proposing
to sojourn there for the autumn, and then to go with Lettice and perhaps
with the Daltons also, on to Rome.

"We have seen nothing so beautiful as this in all our wanderings,"
Lettice said at last in softened tones.

She was looking at the clustering towers of the city, at Brunelleschi's
magnificent dome, and the slender grace of Giotto's Campanile, and
thence, from those storied trophies of transcendant art, her gaze
wandered to the rich valley of the Arno, with its slopes of green and
grey, and its distant line of purple peaks against an opalescent sky.

"It is more beautiful in spring. I miss the glow and scent of the
flowers--the scarlet tulips, the sweet violets," said Mrs. Hartley.

"I cannot imagine anything more beautiful," Edith Dalton rejoined. "One
feels oppressed with so much loveliness. It is beyond expression."

"Silence is most eloquent, perhaps, in a place like this," said Lettice.
"What can one say that is worth saying, or that has not been said
before?"

She was sitting on a fragment of fallen stone, her hands loosely clasped
round her knees, her eyes fixed wistfully and dreamily upon the faint
amethystine tints of the distant hills. Brooke Dalton looked down at her
with an anxious eye. He did not altogether like this pensive mood of
hers; there was something melancholy in the drooping curves of her lips,
in the pathos of her wide gaze, which he did not understand. He tried to
speak lightly, in hopes of recalling her to the festive mood in which
they had all begun the day.

"You remind me of two friends of mine who are just home from Egypt. They
say that when they first saw the Sphinx they sat down and looked at it
for two hours without uttering a word."

"You would not have done that, Brooke," said Mrs. Hartley, a little
maliciously.

"But why not? I think it was the right spirit," said Lettice, and again
lapsed into silence.

"Look at the Duomo, how well it stands out in the evening light!"
exclaimed Edith. "Do you remember what Michael Angelo said when he
turned and looked at it before riding away