mnus failed amid so much dust to arouse her
enthusiasm. She would have been better pleased just then with a
yellow English primrose.

They clambered down the terraced ravines sometimes, a day or two
later, to arid banks by a dry torrent's bed where Italian primroses
really grew, interspersed with tall grape-hyacinths, and scented
violets, and glossy cleft leaves of winter aconite. But even the
primroses were not the same thing to Herminia as those she used to
gather on the dewy slopes of the Redlands; they were so dry and
dust-grimed, and the path by the torrent's side was so distasteful
and unsavory. Bare white boughs of twisted fig-trees depressed
her. Besides, these hills were steep, and Herminia felt the
climbing. Nothing in city or suburbs attracted her soul. Etruscan
Volumnii, each lolling in white travertine on the sculptured lid of
his own sarcophagus urn, and all duly ranged in the twilight of
their tomb at their spectral banquet, stirred her heart but feebly.
St. Francis, Santa Chiara, fell flat on her English fancy. But as
for Alan, he revelled all day long in his native element. He
sketched every morning, among the huddled, strangled lanes;
sketched churches and monasteries, and portals of palazzi; sketched
mountains clear-cut in that pellucid air; till Herminia wondered
how he could sit so long in the broiling sun or keen wind on those
bare hillsides, or on broken brick parapets in those noisome
byways. But your born sketcher is oblivious of all on earth save
his chosen art; and Alan was essentially a painter in fibre,
diverted by pure circumstance into a Chancery practice.

The very pictures in the gallery failed to interest Herminia, she
knew not why. Alan couldn't rouse her to enthusiasm over his
beloved Buonfigli. Those naive flaxen-haired angels, with sweetly
parted lips, and baskets of red roses in their delicate hands, own
sisters though they were to the girlish Lippis she had so admired
at Florence, moved her heart but faintly. Try as she might to like
them, she responded to nothing Perugian in any way.

At the end of a week or two, however, Alan began to complain of
constant headache. He was looking very well, but grew uneasy and
restless. Herminia advised him to give up sketching for a while,
those small streets were so close; and he promised to yield to her
wishes in the matter. Yet he grew worse next day, so that
Herminia, much alarmed, called in an Italian doctor. Perugia
b