d on his shoulder. "Dear Jean, will it comfort you to
hear me swear she means every word of that letter? It's not all over.
You will come together in the end. Her poor blue eyes were drowned in
tears--"

"Oh, don't," Jean said brokenly. The hard line of his lips relaxed. He
hid his face in his hands.

Hilaire went out of the room.

BOOK III.--ROME

CHAPTER I

Olive was alone in the compartment of the train that bore her away
from Florence and from Jean. She had a book; it lay open on her lap,
and she had tried to read, but the lines all ran together and the
effort to concentrate her thoughts made her head ache. She was very
unhappy. It seemed to her that now indeed life was emptied of all
sweets and the taste of it was as dust and ashes in her mouth. She was
leaving youth and joy behind; or rather, she had killed them and left
a man to bury them. At Orvieto she nearly broke down. It would be so
easy to get out and cross over to the other platform and there await
the next train back to Florence. She had her hand upon the handle of
the door when a boy with little flasks of wine in a basket came up and
asked her to buy, and as she answered him she heard the cry of
"_Partenza!_" It was too late; the moment had passed, and after a
while she knew that she was glad she had not yielded. She was doing
the right thing. What was the old French motto? "_Fais ce que doit,
advienne que pourra._" The brave words comforted her a little. She was
very tired, and presently she slept.

She was awakened by the discordant yells of the Roman _facchini_ on
the station platform. One of them carried her box to the office of the
Dogana, but a large party of Americans had come by the same train and
the officials were too busily engaged in turning over the contents of
their innumerable Saratogas to do more than scrabble in chalk on the
side of her shabby leather trunk and shake their heads at the
proffered key, and soon she was in a _vettura_ clattering down the
wide new Via Nazionale.

Signora de Sanctis lived with her sister in one of the old streets in
the lower part of the city near the Pantheon--the Via Arco della
Ciambella. The houses there are built on the foundations of the Baths
of Agrippa, and a brick arch, part of the great Tepidarium, remains to
give the street its name. The poor fragment has been Christianised; a
wayside altar sanctifies it, and a little painted shrine to the
Madonna adorns the base. The buildin