His words struck dumb horror into Herminia's soul. Poor child, how

she shrank at it! It was clear, then, instead of being shocked and

disgusted, Alan positively admired this human Sahara. With an

effort she gulped down her tears and her sighs, and pretended to

look with interest in the directions he pointed. SHE could see

nothing in it all but dry hill-sides, crowned with still drier

towns; unimagined stretches of sultry suburb; devouring wastes of

rubbish and foul immemorial kitchen-middens. And the very fact

that for Alan's sake she couldn't bear to say so--seeing how

pleased and proud he was of Perugia, as if it had been built from

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his own design--made the bitterness of her disappointment more

difficult to endure. She would have given anything at that moment

for an ounce of human sympathy.

She had to learn in time to do without it.

They spent that night at the comfortable hotel, perhaps the best in

Italy. Next morning, they were to go hunting for apartments in the

town, where Alan knew of a suite that would exactly suit them.

After dinner, in the twilight, filled with his artistic joy at

being back in Perugia, his beloved Perugia, he took Herminia out

for a stroll, with a light wrap round her head, on the terrace of

the Prefettura. The air blew fresh and cool now with a certain

mountain sharpness; for, as Alan assured her with pride, they stood

seventeen hundred feet above the level of the Mediterranean. The

moon had risen; the sunset glow had not yet died off the slopes of

the Assisi hill-sides. It streamed through the perforated belfry

of San Domenico; it steeped in rose-color the slender and turreted

shaft of San Pietro, "Perugia's Pennon," the Arrowhead of Umbria.

It gilded the gaunt houses that jut out upon the spine of the Borgo

hill into the valley of the Tiber. Beyond, rose shadowy Apennines,

on whose aerial flanks towns and villages shone out clear in the

mellow moonlight. Far away on their peaks faint specks of

twinkling fire marked indistinguishable sites of high hill-top

castles.

Alan turned to her proudly. "Well, what do you think of that?" he

asked with truly personal interest.

Herminia could only gasp out in a half reluctant way, "It's a

beautiful view, Alan. Beautiful; beautiful; beautiful!"

But she felt conscious to herself it owed its beauty in the main

to the fact that the twilight obscured so much of it. To-morrow

morning, the bare hills would stand out once more in all their

pristine bareness; the white roads would shine forth as white and

dusty as ever; the obtrusive rubbish heaps would press themselves

at every turn upon eye and nostril. She hated the place, to say

the truth; it was a terror to her to think she had to stop so long

in it.




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