must!"

"But now, I mean! 'Here down,' as Mazzini would have said."

"You were ever an impatient little mortal."

"How can one help being impatient for this," she said with a quick sigh.

"That is what I used to say myself seven years ago over you," he said
smiling. "But I learned that the Father knew best, and that if we would
work with Him we must wait with Him too. You musn't waste your strength
in impatience, child, you need every bit of it for the life before you."

But patience did not come by nature to a Raeburn, and Erica did not gain
it in a day even by grace.

CHAPTER XXXII. Fiesole

And yet, because I love thee, I obtain
From that same love this vindicating grace,
To live on still in love, and yet in vain,
To bless thee, yet renounce thee to thy face. E. B. Browning.

Much has been said and written about the monotony of unalloyed pleasure,
and the necessity of shadows and dark places in life as well as in
pictured landscape. And certainly there can be but few in this world of
stern realities who would dispute the fact that pleasure is doubled by
its contrast with preceding pain. Perhaps it was the vividness of this
contrast that made Raeburn and Erica enjoy, with a perfect rapture of
enjoyment, a beautiful view and a beautiful spring day in Italy. Behind
them lay a very sombre past; they had escaped for a brief moment from
the atmosphere of strife, from the world of controversy, from the
scorching breath of slander, from the baleful influences of persecution
and injustice. Before them lay the fairest of all the cities of Italy.
They were sitting in the Boboli gardens, and from wooded heights looked
down upon that loveliest of Italian valleys.

The silver Arno wound its way between the green encircling hills; then
between the old houses of Florence, its waters spanned now by a
light suspension bridge token of modern times now by old brown arches
strengthened and restored, now by the most venerable looking of all the
bridges, the Ponte Vecchio, with its double row of little shops. Into
the cloudless blue sky rose the pinnacles of Santa Croce, the domes of
San Spirito, of the Baptistery, of the Cathedral; sharply defined in
the clear atmosphere were the airy, light Campanile of Giotto, the more
slender brown tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, the spire of Santa Maria
Novella. Northward beyond the city rose the heights of Fiesole, and to
the east the green hills dotted all over with