hantment over towers and roofs. It spread a veil of ineffable
brightness upon the city and tinged green Arno also, where the river
wound through the midst.

Sir Walter was quietly happy, because he knew that in a fortnight his
friends, Ernest and Nelly Travers, would be at Florence. Mary, too,
prepared to welcome them gladly, for her father's sake. He left his
daughter largely undisturbed, and while they took their walks
together, the old man, to whom neither music nor pictures conveyed much
significance, let her wander at will, and the more readily because
he found that art was beginning to exercise a precious influence over
Mary's mind. There was none to guide her studies, but she pursued them
with a plan of her own, and though at first the effort sometimes left
her weary, yet she persisted until she began to perceive at least the
immensity of the knowledge she desired to acquire.

Music soothed her mind; painting offered an interest, part sensuous,
part intellectual. Perhaps she loved music best at first, since it
brought a direct anodyne. In the sound of music she could bear to
think of her brief love story. She even made her father come and listen
presently to things that she began to value.

Their minds inevitably proceeded by different channels of thought, and
while she strove resolutely to occupy herself with the new interests,
and put away the agony of the past, till thinking was bearable again
and a road to peace under her feet once more, Sir Walter seldom found
himself passing many hours without recurrence of painful memories and
a sustained longing to strip the darkness which buried them. To his
forthright and simple intelligence, mystery was hateful, and the
reflection that his home must for ever hold a profound and appalling
mystery often thrust itself upon his thoughts, and even inclined him, in
some moods, to see Chadlands no more. Yet a natural longing to return
to the old environment, in which he could move with ease and comfort,
gradually mastered him, and as the spring advanced he often sighed
for Devonshire, yet wondered how he could do so. Then would return the
gloomy history of the winter rolling over his spirit like a cloud, and
the thought of going home again grew distasteful.

Mary, however, knew her father well enough, and at this lustrous hour,
while Florence stretched beneath them in its quiet, evening beauty, she
declared that they must not much longer delay their return.

"Plenty of t