e ground and
first floors, were pleasantly high, and paved with brick tiles. From the
one large interior room a window-door opened on to a terrace in the
court--a deep brick terrace with a broad ledge on which stood a row of
flower-pots. When water was wanted, you opened a little door in the
kitchen wall and let your copper urn down, down, down into
mossy-smelling blackness; you heard a splash and gurgle, and after
proper exertions got it back brimming.

The Italian-ness of it all captivated the mother, who had been drawn to
this dot on the map, where she was told one could live well at less
expense than in the United States, by the lure of the idea of Italy. She
was very humbly an artist. She had given drawing lessons to young ladies
in an elegant seminary, and, when approaching middle age, married the
father of one of these, a troubled, conscientious man whom the cares of
an entangled and disintegrating business kept awake at night. When his
need for feminine sympathy ceased, and administrators settled in their
summary way the questions that had furrowed his brow, his widow's wish
to start life anew far from the scene of her worries had led to the
balmy thought of Italy--Italy, where were all the wonders which had most
glamour for her fancy.

She had loved it in an undiminished way to the end, had never really
desired to go home, though she spoke of it sometimes when the chill of
the stone floors and walls shook her fortitude, and the remembrance of
furnace heat, gas-light, hot water on tap, glowed rosy as a promise of
eternal summer. The children, however, were taught in their respective
schools that artificial heat is insalubrious; they had Italian ideas and
chilblains; not on account of any creature comfort that they missed
would Florence have been changed back for Charlestown.

In her picturing of days far ahead Mrs. Fane certainly saw Lucile, an
accomplished young lady, receiving tributes of attention in the
drawing-rooms of home; and Gerald, a young man of parts, finding
recognition and fortune among his countrymen. To go home eventually was
among her cloudy plans.

But Lucile died at sixteen, without adequate cause, one almost would
have said. She merely had not the ruggedness, the resistance, needed to
go on living among the rough winds of this world. The mother, a creature
of old-fashioned gentleness and profound affections, survived her by
only a few years.

A business matter then obliged Gerald to go