r chin and her face
turned away to miss no point of the cypresses and warm, illumined walls,
there was nothing to prove that any one of a hundred towns might not
have produced her. Peter remembered what sort of people wore gloves like
that in Bloombury--the minister's wife, the school teacher, his mother
and Ellen--and was instantly sure she would not have been travelling
through Italy first-class except at the instigation of the large,
widowed and distrustful woman with whom she got on at Padua. This lady,
also, Peter understood very well. He thought it likely she sat in
rocking chairs a great deal at home and travelled to improve her mind.
She had, moreover, a general air of proclaiming the unwarrantableness of
railway acquaintances, which alone would have prevented Peter from
asking the girl, as he absurdly wanted to, if they had painted the new
school-house yet, and if there had been much water that year in Miller's
pond.

As she sat so with her round hat pushed askew by the window-glass, there
was some delicate reminder about her that streaked the rich Italian
landscape with vestiges of Bloombury.

He looked out of the window where she looked and saw the white
straight-sided villas change to green-shuttered farmhouses, and fine old
Roman roads lead on to Harmony. It was all there for him in its
unexpectedness, as freshly touching as those reminders of his mother
which he came upon occasionally where Ellen kept them laid by in
lavender; as if the girl had shaken from the folds of her jacket of
unmistakable Bloombury cut, Youth for him--his own--anybody's Youth--no
limp and yellowed keepsake, but all crisply done up and ready for
putting on. So sharp for the moment was his sense of accepting the
invitation to put it on with her as the best possible traveller's guise,
especially for seeing Venice in, that catching the speculative eye of
the large lady turned upon him, he quailed sensibly. She had the air of
having detected him in an attempt to establish a relation with her
companion on the ground of their common youngness, and finding herself
much more a match for him both in years and in respect to their common
origin. Whatever passed between the two women, and something did pass
wordlessly, with hardly so much substance as a look, remained there, not
intrusively, but as proof that what he had been seeking was still going
on in some far but attainable place. It was the first movement of an
accomplished recovery, fo