Lady Niton’s sarcasms recurred to her.  She was not sure whether she welcomed or disliked the idea.  But, after all, why not?

CHAPTER XVI

“Ecco, Signorina! il Convento!”

The driver reined up his horse, pointing with his whip.

Diana and Muriel Colwood stood up eagerly in the carriage, and there at the end of the long white road, blazing on the mountain-side, terrace upon terrace, arch upon arch, rose the majestic pile of buildings which bears the name of St. Francis.  Nothing else from this point was to be seen of Assisi.  The sun, descending over the mountain of Orvieto, flooded the building itself with a level and blinding light, while upon Monte Subasio, behind, a vast thunder-cloud, towering in the southern sky, threw storm-shadows, darkly purple, across the mountain-side, and from their bosom the monastery, the churches, and those huge substructures which make the platform on which the convent stands, shone out in startling splendor.

The travellers gazed their fill, and the carriage clattered on.

As they neared the town and began to climb the hill Diana looked round her—­at the plain through which they had come, at the mountains to the east, at the dome of the Portiuncula.  Under the rushing light and shade of the storm-clouds, the blues of the hills, the young green of the vines, the silver of the olives, rose and faded, as it were, in waves of color, impetuous and magnificent.  Only the great golden building, crowned by its double church, most famous of all the shrines of Italy, glowed steadily, amid the alternating gleam and gloom—­fit guardian of that still living and burning memory which is St. Francis.

“We shall be happy here, sha’n’t we?” said Diana, stealing a hand into her companion’s.  “And we needn’t hurry away.”

She drew a long breath.  Muriel looked at her tenderly—­enchanted whenever the old enthusiasm, the old buoyancy reappeared.  They had now been in Italy for nearly two months.  Muriel knew that for her companion the time had passed in one long wrestle for a new moral and spiritual standing-ground.  All the glory of Italy had passed before the girl’s troubled eyes as something beautiful but incoherent, a dream landscape, on which only now and then her full consciousness laid hold.  For to the intenser feeling of youth, full reality belongs only to the world within; the world where the heart loves and suffers.  Diana’s true life was there; and she did not even admit the loyal and gentle woman who had taken a sister’s place beside her to a knowledge of its ebb and flow.  She bore herself cheerfully and simply; went to picture-galleries and churches; sketched and read—­making no parade either of sorrow or of endurance.  But the impression on Mrs. Colwood all the time was of a desperately struggling soul voyaging strange seas of grief alone.  She sometimes—­though rarely—­talked with Muriel of her mother’s case; she would