in its grassy solitude. The level sunbeams had not yet penetrated the
surrounding palisade of boughs, and the house lay in a chill twilight
that seemed an emanation from its mouldering walls. As Odo approached,
Gamba appeared from the shadow and took his horse; and the next moment
he had pushed open the door, and stood in Fulvia's presence.

She was seated at the farther end of the room, and as she rose to meet
him it chanced that her head, enveloped in its black travelling-hood,
was relieved for a moment against the tarnished background of the broken
mirror. The impression struck a chill to his heart; but it was replaced
by a glow of boyish happiness as their eyes met and he felt her hands in
his.

For a moment all his thoughts were lost in the mere sense of her
nearness. She seemed simply an enveloping atmosphere in which he drew
fresh breath; but gradually her outline emerged from this haze of
feeling, and he found himself looking at her with the wondering gaze of
a stranger. She had been a girl of sixteen when they first met. Twelve
years had passed since then, and she was now a woman of twenty-eight,
belonging to a race in which beauty ripens early and as soon declines.
But some happy property of nature--whether the rare mould of her
features or the gift of the spirit that informed them--had held her
loveliness intact, preserving the clear lines of youth after its bloom
was gone, and making her seem like a lover's memory of herself. So she
appeared at first, a bright imponderable presence gliding toward him out
of the past; but as her hands lay in his the warm current of life was
renewed between them, and the woman dispossessed the shade.

4.5.

Unpublished fragment from Mr. Arthur Young's diary of his travels in
Italy in the year 1789.

October 1st.

Having agreed with a vetturino to carry me to Pianura, set out this
morning from Mantua. The country mostly arable, with rows of elm and
maple pollard. Dined at Casal Maggiore, in an infamous filthy inn. At
dinner was joined by a gentleman who had taken the other seat in the
vettura as far as Pianura. We engaged in conversation and I found him a
man of lively intelligence and the most polished address. Though dressed
in the foreign style, en abbe, he spoke English with as much fluency as
myself, and but for the philosophical tone of his remarks I had taken
him for an ecclesiastic. Altogether a striking and somewhat perplexing
character: able, keen, intelligen