out clear in the
mellow moonlight. Far away on their peaks faint specks of
twinkling fire marked indistinguishable sites of high hill-top
castles.

Alan turned to her proudly. "Well, what do you think of that?" he
asked with truly personal interest.

Herminia could only gasp out in a half reluctant way, "It's a
beautiful view, Alan. Beautiful; beautiful; beautiful!"

But she felt conscious to herself it owed its beauty in the main
to the fact that the twilight obscured so much of it. To-morrow
morning, the bare hills would stand out once more in all their
pristine bareness; the white roads would shine forth as white and
dusty as ever; the obtrusive rubbish heaps would press themselves
at every turn upon eye and nostril. She hated the place, to say
the truth; it was a terror to her to think she had to stop so long
in it.

Most famous towns, in fact, need to be twice seen: the first time
briefly to face the inevitable disappointment to our expectations;
the second time, at leisure, to reconstruct and appraise the
surviving reality. Imagination so easily beggars performance.
Rome, Cairo, the Nile, are obvious examples; the grand exceptions
are Venice and Florence,--in a lesser degree, Bruges, Munich, Pisa.
As for Umbria, 'tis a poor thing; our own Devon snaps her fingers
at it.

Moreover, to say the truth, Herminia was too fresh to Italy to
appreciate the smaller or second-rate towns at their real value.
Even northerners love Florence and Venice at first sight; those
take their hearts by storm; but Perugia, Siena, Orvieto, are an
acquired taste, like olives and caviare, and it takes time to
acquire it. Alan had not made due allowance for this psychological
truth of the northern natures. A Celt in essence, thoroughly
Italianate himself, and with a deep love for the picturesque, which
often makes men insensible to dirt and discomfort, he expected to
Italianize Herminia too rapidly. Herminia, on the other hand,
belonged more strictly to the intellectual and somewhat inartistic
English type. The picturesque alone did not suffice for her.
Cleanliness and fresh air were far dearer to her soul than the
quaintest street corners, the oddest old archways; she pined in
Perugia for a green English hillside.

The time, too, was unfortunate, after no rain for weeks; for
rainlessness, besides doubling the native stock of dust, brings out
to the full the ancestral Etruscan odors of Perugia. So, when next
morning Her