seem mouldering away in disuse, and yet your footstep brings figures of startling Roman type to the doorways.  There are few monuments here, but no part of Rome seemed more historic, in the sense of being weighted with a crushing past, blighted with the melancholy of things that had had their day.  When the yellow afternoon sunshine slept on the sallow, battered walls, and lengthened the shadows in the grassy courtyards of small closed churches, the place acquired a strange fascination.  The church of Saint Cecilia has one of these sunny, waste-looking courts; the edifice seems abandoned to silence and the charity of chance devotion.  Rowland never passed it without going in, and he was generally the only visitor.  He entered it now, but found that two persons had preceded him.  Both were women.  One was at her prayers at one of the side altars; the other was seated against a column at the upper end of the nave.  Rowland walked to the altar, and paid, in a momentary glance at the clever statue of the saint in death, in the niche beneath it, the usual tribute to the charm of polished ingenuity.  As he turned away he looked at the person seated and recognized Christina Light.  Seeing that she perceived him, he advanced to speak to her.

She was sitting in a listless attitude, with her hands in her lap; she seemed to be tired.  She was dressed simply, as if for walking and escaping observation.  When he had greeted her he glanced back at her companion, and recognized the faithful Assunta.

Christina smiled.  “Are you looking for Mr. Hudson?  He is not here, I am happy to say.”

“But you?” he asked.  “This is a strange place to find you.”

“Not at all!  People call me a strange girl, and I might as well have the comfort of it.  I came to take a walk; that, by the way, is part of my strangeness.  I can’t loll all the morning on a sofa, and all the afternoon in a carriage.  I get horribly restless.  I must move; I must do something and see something.  Mamma suggests a cup of tea.  Meanwhile I put on an old dress and half a dozen veils, I take Assunta under my arm, and we start on a pedestrian tour.  It ’s a bore that I can’t take the poodle, but he attracts attention.  We trudge about everywhere; there is nothing I like so much.  I hope you will congratulate me on the simplicity of my tastes.”

“I congratulate you on your wisdom.  To live in Rome and not to walk would, I think, be poor pleasure.  But you are terribly far from home, and I am afraid you are tired.”

“A little—­enough to sit here a while.”

“Might I offer you my company while you rest?”

“If you will promise to amuse me.  I am in dismal spirits.”

Rowland said he would do what he could, and brought a chair and placed it near her.  He was not in love with her; he disapproved of her; he mistrusted her; and yet he felt it a kind of privilege to watch her, and he found a peculiar excitement in talking to her.  The background of her nature, as he would have called it, was large and mysterious, and it emitted strange, fantastic gleams and flashes.  Watching for these rather quickened one’s pulses.  Moreover, it was not a disadvantage to talk to a girl who made one keep guard on one’s composure; it diminished one’s chronic liability to utter something less than revised wisdom.