hat was how Peter happened to be leaning over the forward rail of
an Atlantic steamer on his way to Italy, which he had chosen because the
date of sailing happened to be convenient. But he knew, as he stood
looking down at the surface of the water, rough-hewn by the wind, that
whatever the doctor said to Lessing, or Ellen surmised, he would get no
good there except as it showed him the way to the House of the Shining
Walls.

He did not remember where in the blind pointless ring through which the
steamer chugged and wallowed as though it were a superior sort of water
beetle and the horizon a circle of its own making, he began to get
sufficiently acquainted with his fellow passengers, to understand that
they were most of them going abroad in the interest of unrealized
estates, and abounded in confidence. To see them forever forward and
agaze at the lit shores of Spain and the Islands of Desire, roused in
him the faint savour of expectation. Which, however, did not prevent him
from finding Naples squalid, and Rome, where he arrived in the middle of
the tourist season, too modern in a cheap, second-rate sort of way. He
could remember when Rome had furnished some excellent company for the
House, and suffered in the places of renown an indeterminable pang like
the ache of an amputated stump. It seemed, on occasion, as if the old
trails might lie down the hollow of the Forum, under the arch of that
broken aqueduct, beside the dark Volsinian mere; but when Peter arrived
at any of these places he found them prepossessed by Germans gabbling
out of _Baedekers_. The Sistine Chapel made the back of his neck ache
and he came no nearer than seven tourists to the noble quietude of the
Vatican can marbles.

"I must remember," said Peter to himself, "that I am a very sick man,
and crowds annoy me."

Then he went into the country and saw the gray of the olives above the
springing grass, like the silver bloom on a green plum, and began to
experience the pangs of recovery. He found Hadrian's Villa and the
garden of the Villa d'Este, and remembered other things. He remembered
the flat malachite-coloured pools, the definite, pointed cypresses and
the fountain's soft incessant rain--as it had been in the House. As it
_was_ in the House. For he understood in Italy what was still the most
bitter to know, that though it might yet be somewhere in the world, he
was never to find it any more. Toward all that once had led him thither,
his sense wa