maining in England?"

"Probably I shall."

"You will return to your home in Lancashire?"

"I haven't yet determined," she replied formally.

The dialogue seemed to be at an end. Unobservant of each other, they
reached the Via Crucis, which leads up to S. Pietro in Montorio.
Arrived at the terrace, they stood to look down on Rome.

"After all, you are tired," said Mallard, when he had glanced at her.

"Indeed I am not."

"But you are hungry. We have been forgetting that it is luncheon-time."

"I pay little attention to such hours. One can always get something to
eat."

"It's all very well for people like myself to talk in that way," said
Mallard, with a smile, "but women have orderly habits of life."

"For which you a little despise them?" she returned, with grave face
fixed on the landscape.

"Certainly not. It's only that I regard their life as wholly different
from my own. Since I was a boy, I have known nothing of domestic
regularity."

"You sometimes visit your relatives?"

"Yes. But their life cannot be mine. It is domestic in such a degree
that it only serves to remind me how far apart I am."

"Do you hold that an artist cannot live like other people, in the
habits of home?"

"I think such habits are a danger to him. He _may_ find a home, if fate
is exceptionally kind."

Pointing northwards to a ridged hill on the horizon, he asked in
another voice if she knew its name.

"You mean Mount Soracte?"

"Yes. You don't know Latin, or it would make you quote Horace."

She shook her head, looked down, and spoke more humbly than he had ever
yet heard her.

"But I know it in an English translation."

"Well, that's more than most women do."

He said it in a grudging way. The remark itself was scarcely civil, but
he seemed all at once to have a pleasure in speaking roughly, in
reminding her of her shortcomings. Miriam turned her eyes in another
quarter, and presently pointed to the far blue hills just seen between
the Alban and the Sabine ranges.

"Through there is the country of the Volsci," she said, in a subdued
voice. "Some Roman must have stood here and looked towards it, in days
when Rome was struggling for supremacy with them. Think of all that
happened between that day and the time when Horace saw the snow on
Soracte; and then, of all that has happened since."

He watched her face, and nodded several times. They pursued the
subject, and reminded each other of what the scene suggested, p