plains, where thin steely curves of water shone like sickles laid late to the fields; where olive-hued canals meandered; where the mulberry neighboured the chestnut and the vine. Lombardy, where in the

sordid towns bold beggars swarmed, and shameless hoydens flaunted, and swarthy priests with furtive eyes droned at their greasy breviaries as they passed. From post to post the vetturini, beating the tortured horses, drove them along, past gorges filled with myrtle, on roads that were lined with crackling elms still garlanded with empty vines. A land of shrines, ossuaries, churches; with calvaries and crosses all along the way; how piously, now that he was in priestly Italy, Aldo had crossed himself at every wayside haunt of prayer! Poplar-bordered brooks, silvergrey olive orchards, battalions of mournful cypress, stript almond trees, red towers of ruinous villas just seen amid grey woods of ilex; white, calm oxen with scarlet head-bands under black horns; the coasting road, with the sea on the sunset side; Spezzia, Pisa; and a sunny turquoise sky over all.

Hark, what was that upon the Derby road? The distant sound of horses? She listened fruitlessly, and her thoughts went drifting back to Italy again.

At last, the Campagna, barren, silent, dull, where pestilence hibernated, where the ruins of feudal tower and Cæsarian aqueduct lay strewn like bones along

a Saharan track.

On a hill above Baccano the vetturino pulled up his horses with clatter of shingle and grind of wheels; pompously he pointed his whip toward the horizon. There, between two blue mounts, a pinnacle was faintly seen. Roma!" The vetturino mouthed the word with pride. "Roma!" That was

the pinnacle upon St. Peter's Dome.

Then turrets and cupolas surging up, long lines of palace façades interlocking, the myrtled hill of the Pincian gleaming, St. Peter's lifting ever more mighty at each reach in the winding approach, fixing the eye and finishing the spectacle; the gallop across the Milvian bridge, with the Tiber sullen below; the rattle through narrow streets into the great Square of the Steps, the turn into the Via di Condotti, the gallop along the Corso, the descent from the cramping canestrella at the Piazza Colonna-Rome!

Rome! As she entered the city eleven strong sweet strokes had sounded from the bell-tower on the Mount of the Trinity, strokes that lingered warningly above the aged, wicked city, which at every epoch seems in its doomed eleventh hour. Rome! ruin built upon ruin, the church posed on the temple, the cross topping the phallic obelisk, the luscious bas-relief built into the ascetic convent's wall. Rome! the terraced garden, the frescoed loggia, the palace with statued court and marble stair; the spouting dolphins, the vine-trellis and the orangery, the crumbling gate, the portico, the colonnade; Rome!

Ah, well! none of the other girls at Derby school had gone upon a wedding journey such as that; none of them would ever know the great world as she had seen it; what were their petty routs and provincial assemblies and theatre-goings compared to the splendours she had known? And Dahlia stirred with leisurely grace, rose up calmly, with ample gesture shook from her wide shoulders the weight of four years' cares, and stood upon her watch with a more hopeful eye. Wedlock had not been all an error; some splendid pulsing moments had been hers; life for her might yet go well. "Who knows?" she muttered; "who knows?"

Mockingly from the stem of an elm hard by came the laugh and the tap of the wood-pecking green whaffle; the laugh was almost human, the tap was like the hollow thud of hammer on coffin-lid. Down in the tan the companion of her wedding journey lay panting, cursing, coughing; and a brace of redwaistcoated horsemen were coming up the Derby road.

86

CHAPTER IX.

TELLS OF THE TAN IN THE PEST-HOLE.

Ainsi que la vertu, le crime a ses degrés.

-Phedre, iv., 2.

The best houses there were of canvas or entiltments.

-Lenten Stuffe.

I have lain so many nights

A bedmate of the snail, and eft, and snake,
In grass and burdock.

-The Holy Grail.

Poverty makes some humble, but more malignant.

-Eugene Aram, i., 6.

Il mangea de cette chose inexprimable, qu'on appelle de la vache

enragée.

-Les Misérables.

Then might you see

Cowls, hoods, and habits, with their wearers, tossed

And fluttered into rags; then relics, beads,

Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls,

The sport of winds.

-Paradise Lost, iii.

His checks no longer drew the cash

Because, as his comrades explained in flash-
He had overdrawn his badger.

-MISS KILMANSEGG.

87

IX.

MEANWHILE the gypsy was making his way down to the tan.

The Rommanies were camped within the ring of a natural amphitheatre. The arena was small, and a wall of hill and crag so hemmed it in that even from neighbouring heights its occupants were screened from view. But the tan had another protection. The spot was shunned as a place of ancient burial; mounds, large as the graves of giants, swelled the sward; it was the Pest-Hole, where a hundred plaguespotted dead had been shudderingly thrust from view two centuries before. That antique terror haunted and sentinelled the place; the dread of old contagion still steaming from the turf guarded it from visitation. Twice within memory a Stoniton herdsman had sweated into fever and died of fear-his punishment for seeking stray cattle in the Pest-Hole. Besides, the spirit of Markham Belk, the hardly human solitary who buried and robbed the spotty bodies of the dead, did it not wander there, by day and night, with shriek and moan for penance? Only Rommanies dare dwell in such a haunt; and this tradition, together with the screens of hill and crag and foliage run wild, made it a place of safe