pon
about at that rate in their vitals. Allow me to say I am sleepy. Good
night!"

Some days afterward it happened that Rowland, on a long afternoon
ramble, took his way through one of the quiet corners of the Trastevere.
He was particularly fond of this part of Rome, though he could hardly
have expressed the charm he found in it. As you pass away from the
dusky, swarming purlieus of the Ghetto, you emerge into a region of
empty, soundless, grass-grown lanes and alleys, where the shabby houses
seem mouldering away in disuse, and yet your footstep brings figures of
startling Roman type to the doorways. There are few monuments here, but
no part of Rome seemed more historic, in the sense of being weighted
with a crushing past, blighted with the melancholy of things that had
had their day. When the yellow afternoon sunshine slept on the sallow,
battered walls, and lengthened the shadows in the grassy courtyards of
small closed churches, the place acquired a strange fascination. The
church of Saint Cecilia has one of these sunny, waste-looking courts;
the edifice seems abandoned to silence and the charity of chance
devotion. Rowland never passed it without going in, and he was generally
the only visitor. He entered it now, but found that two persons had
preceded him. Both were women. One was at her prayers at one of the side
altars; the other was seated against a column at the upper end of the
nave. Rowland walked to the altar, and paid, in a momentary glance at
the clever statue of the saint in death, in the niche beneath it, the
usual tribute to the charm of polished ingenuity. As he turned away he
looked at the person seated and recognized Christina Light. Seeing that
she perceived him, he advanced to speak to her.

She was sitting in a listless attitude, with her hands in her lap;
she seemed to be tired. She was dressed simply, as if for walking and
escaping observation. When he had greeted her he glanced back at her
companion, and recognized the faithful Assunta.

Christina smiled. "Are you looking for Mr. Hudson? He is not here, I am
happy to say."

"But you?" he asked. "This is a strange place to find you."

"Not at all! People call me a strange girl, and I might as well have the
comfort of it. I came to take a walk; that, by the way, is part of
my strangeness. I can't loll all the morning on a sofa, and all the
afternoon in a carriage. I get horribly restless. I must move; I must
do something and see something.