do had lost none of his sensitiveness to such impressions; but the sway
of another mood turned his eye from the outstretched beauty of the city
to the vernal solitude about him. It was the season when old memories of
Donnaz worked in his blood; when the banks and hedges of the fresh
hill-country about Turin cheated him with a breath of budding
beech-groves and the fragrance of crushed fern in the glens of the high
Pennine valleys. It was a mere waft, perhaps, from some clod of loosened
earth, or the touch of cool elastic moss as he flung himself face
downward under the trees; but the savour, the contact filled his
nostrils with mountain air and his eyes with dim-branched distances. At
Donnaz the slow motions of the northern spring had endeared to him all
those sweet incipiencies preceding the full choral burst of leaf and
flower: the mauve mist over bare woodlands, the wet black gleams in
frost-bound hollows, the thrust of fronds through withered bracken, the
primrose-patches spreading like pale sunshine along wintry lanes. He had
always felt a sympathy for these delicate unnoted changes; but the
feeling which had formerly been like the blind stir of sap in a plant
was now a conscious sensation that groped for speech and understanding.

He had grown up among people to whom such emotions were unknown. The old
Marquess's passion for his fields and woods was the love of the
agriculturist and the hunter, not that of the naturalist or the poet;
and the aristocracy of the cities regarded the country merely as so much
soil from which to draw their maintenance. The gentlefolk never absented
themselves from town but for a few weeks of autumn, when they went to
their villas for the vintage, transporting thither all the diversions of
city life and venturing no farther afield than the pleasure-grounds that
were but so many open-air card-rooms, concert-halls and theatres. Odo's
tenderness for every sylvan function of renewal and decay, every
shifting of light and colour on the flying surface of the year, would
have been met with the same stare with which a certain enchanting
Countess had received the handful of wind-flowers that, fresh from a
sunrise on the hills, he had laid one morning among her toilet-boxes.
The Countess Clarice had stared and laughed, and every one of his
acquaintance, Alfieri even, would have echoed her laugh; but one man at
least had felt the divine commotion of nature's touch, had felt and
interpreted it, in w