He was a sensitive, shrinking child, easily irritated, and given to brooding.  One night she awoke from a fitful sleep to find him shivering by her bed, his little pale face and terrified eyes defined by the moonlight that streamed in from the opposite window.  “It is my uncle,” he whispered; “he came into my room all red with blood; he wants a grave; he is tired of wandering over the hills.”  As she caught the child in her arms her mind found a new mooring in the determination to seek freedom for him and for herself from the memories of Assisi, where night brought restless spectres and day revealed the blackened walls and ruins of Perugia.

That was fourteen years ago, but to-day she knew that in Rome she herself had never wholly been at home.  Her income had sufficed for a very modest establishment in the desirable Esquiline quarter; and her good, if provincial, ancestry had placed her in an agreeable circle of friends.  She and her son had no entree among the greater Roman nobles, but they had a claim on the acquaintance of several families connected with the government and through them she had all the introductions she needed.  There was, however, much about city life which offended her tastes.  Its restlessness annoyed her, its indifference chilled her.  Architecture and sculpture failed to make up to her for the presence of mountain and valley.  Ornate temples, crowded with fashionable votaries, more often estranged than comforted her.  Agrippa’s new Pantheon was now the talk of the day, but to her the building seemed cold and formal.  And two years ago, when all Rome flocked to the dedication of the new temple of Apollo on the Palatine, her own excitement had given way to tender memories of the dedication of Minerva’s temple in her old home.  Inside the spacious Roman portico, with its columns of African marble and its wonderful images of beasts and mortals and gods, and in front of the gleaming temple, with its doors of carven ivory and the sun’s chariot poised above its gable peak, she had been conscious chiefly of a longing to see once more the homely market-place of Assisi, to climb the high steps to the exquisite temple-porch which faced southward toward the sunbathed valley, and then to seek the cool dimness within, where the Guardian of Woman’s Work stood ready to hear her prayers.

To-day as she walked feverishly up and down, fretted by the walls of her Roman house, her homesickness grew into a violent desire for the old life.  Perugia was rebuilt, and rehabilitated, in spite of the conquering name of Augustus superimposed upon its most ancient Etruscan portal.  Assisi was plying a busy and happy life on the opposite hillside.  The intervening valley, once cowering under the flail of war, was given over now to plenty and to peace.  Its beauty, as she had seen it last, recurred to her vividly.  She had left home in the early morning.  The sky still held the flush of dawn, and the white mists were just rising from the valley and floating