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.

The railway journey, indeed, seemed extremely pretty. What a march

of sweet pictures! They mounted with creaking wheels the slow

ascent up the picturesque glen where the Arno runs deep, to the

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white towers of Arezzo; then Cortona throned in state on its lonely

hill-top, and girt by its gigantic Etruscan walls; next the low

bank, the lucid green water, the olive-clad slopes of reedy

Thrasymene; last of all, the sere hills and city-capped heights of

their goal, Perugia.

For its name's sake alone, Herminia was prepared to admire the

antique Umbrian capital. And Alan loved it so much, and was so

determined she ought to love it too, that she was ready to be

pleased with everything in it. Until she arrived there--and then,

oh, poor heart, what a grievous disappointment! It was late April

weather when they reached the station at the foot of that high hill

where Augusta Perusia sits lording it on her throne over the wedded

valleys of the Tiber and the Clitumnus. Tramontana was blowing.

No rain had fallen for weeks; the slopes of the lower Apennines,

ever dry and dusty, shone still drier and dustier than Alan had yet

beheld them. Herminia glanced up at the long white road, thick in

deep gray powder, that led by endless zigzags along the dreary

slope to the long white town on the shadeless hill-top. At first

sight alone, Perugia was a startling disillusion to Herminia. She

didn't yet know how bitterly she was doomed hereafter to hate every

dreary dirty street in it. But she knew at the first blush that

the Perugia she had imagined and pictured to herself didn't really

exist and had never existed.

She had figured in her own mind a beautiful breezy town, high set

on a peaked hill, in fresh and mossy country. She had envisaged

the mountains to her soul as clad with shady woods, and strewn with

huge boulders under whose umbrageous shelter bloomed waving masses

of the pretty pale blue Apennine anemones she saw sold in big

bunches at the street corners in Florence. She had imagined, in

short, that Umbria was a wilder Italian Wales, as fresh, as green,

as sweet-scented, as fountain-fed. And she knew pretty well whence

she had derived that strange and utterly false conception. She had

fancied Perugia as one of those mountain villages described by

Macaulay, the sort of hilltop stronghold




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