the majestic pile of buildings which
bears the name of St. Francis. Nothing else from this point was to be
seen of Assisi. The sun, descending over the mountain of Orvieto,
flooded the building itself with a level and blinding light, while upon
Monte Subasio, behind, a vast thunder-cloud, towering in the southern
sky, threw storm-shadows, darkly purple, across the mountain-side, and
from their bosom the monastery, the churches, and those huge
substructures which make the platform on which the convent stands, shone
out in startling splendor.

The travellers gazed their fill, and the carriage clattered on.

As they neared the town and began to climb the hill Diana looked round
her--at the plain through which they had come, at the mountains to the
east, at the dome of the Portiuncula. Under the rushing light and shade
of the storm-clouds, the blues of the hills, the young green of the
vines, the silver of the olives, rose and faded, as it were, in waves of
color, impetuous and magnificent. Only the great golden building,
crowned by its double church, most famous of all the shrines of Italy,
glowed steadily, amid the alternating gleam and gloom--fit guardian of
that still living and burning memory which is St. Francis.

"We shall be happy here, sha'n't we?" said Diana, stealing a hand into
her companion's. "And we needn't hurry away."

She drew a long breath. Muriel looked at her tenderly--enchanted
whenever the old enthusiasm, the old buoyancy reappeared. They had now
been in Italy for nearly two months. Muriel knew that for her companion
the time had passed in one long wrestle for a new moral and spiritual
standing-ground. All the glory of Italy had passed before the girl's
troubled eyes as something beautiful but incoherent, a dream landscape,
on which only now and then her full consciousness laid hold. For to the
intenser feeling of youth, full reality belongs only to the world
within; the world where the heart loves and suffers. Diana's true life
was there; and she did not even admit the loyal and gentle woman who had
taken a sister's place beside her to a knowledge of its ebb and flow.
She bore herself cheerfully and simply; went to picture-galleries and
churches; sketched and read--making no parade either of sorrow or of
endurance. But the impression on Mrs. Colwood all the time was of a
desperately struggling soul voyaging strange seas of grief alone. She
sometimes--though rarely--talked with Muriel of her mothe