She had never before known what it was to have her lover continuously with her.  And his aid in those long corridors, where bambinos smiled down at her with childish lips, helped her wondrously to understand in so short a time what they sought to convey to her.  Alan was steeped in Italy; he knew and entered into the spirit of Tuscan art; and now for the first time Herminia found herself face to face with a thoroughly new subject in which Alan could be her teacher from the very beginning, as most men are teachers to the women who depend upon them.  This sense of support and restfulness and clinging was fresh and delightful to her.  It is a woman’s ancestral part to look up to the man; she is happiest in doing it, and must long remain so; and Herminia was not sorry to find herself in this so much a woman.  She thought it delicious to roam through the long halls of some great gallery with Alan, and let him point out to her the pictures he loved best, explain their peculiar merits, and show the subtle relation in which they stood to the pictures that went before them and the pictures that came after them, as well as to the other work of the same master or his contemporaries.  It was even no small joy to her to find that he knew so much more about art and its message than she did; that she could look up to his judgment, confide in his opinion, see the truth of his criticism, profit much by his instruction.  So well did she use those seven short days, indeed, that she came to Florence with Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, mere names; and she went away from it feeling that she had made them real friends and possessions for a life-time.

So the hours whirled fast in those enchanted halls, and Herminia’s soul was enriched by new tastes and new interests.  O towers of fretted stone!  O jasper and porphyry!  Her very state of health made her more susceptible than usual to fresh impressions, and drew Alan at the same time every day into closer union with her.  For was not the young life now quickening within her half his and half hers, and did it not seem to make the father by reflex nearer and dearer to her?  Surely the child that was nurtured, unborn, on those marble colonnades and those placid Saint Catherines must draw in with each pulse of its antenatal nutriment some tincture of beauty, of freedom, of culture!  So Herminia thought to herself as she lay awake at night and looked out of the window from the curtains of her bed at the boundless dome and the tall campanile gleaming white in the moonlight.  So we have each of us thought—­ especially the mothers in Israel among us—­about the unborn babe that hastens along to its birth with such a radiant halo of the possible future ever gilding and glorifying its unseen forehead.

X.

All happy times must end, and the happier the sooner.  At one short week’s close they hurried on to Perugia.

And how full Alan had been of Perugia beforehand!  He loved every stone of the town, every shadow of the hillsides, he told Herminia at Florence; and Herminia started on her way accordingly well prepared to fall quite as madly in love with the Umbrian capital as Alan himself had done.