Page 732 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

long-unanswered prayers. There was no gentler nor less
consistent heretic than Isabel; the firmest of worshippers,
gazing at dark altar-pictures or clustered candles, could not
have felt more intimately the suggestiveness of these objects
nor have been more liable at such moments to a spiritual
visitation. Pansy, as we know, was almost always her com-
panion, and of late the Countess Gemini, balancing a pink
parasol, had lent brilliancy to their equipage; but she still
occasionally found herself alone when it suited her mood
and where it suited the place. On such occasions she had
several resorts; the most accessible of which perhaps was a
seat on the low parapet which edges the wide grassy space
before the high, cold front of Saint John Lateran, whence
you look across the Campagna at the far-trailing outline of
the Alban Mount and at that mighty plain, between, which
is still so full of all that has passed from it. After the depar-
ture of her cousin and his companions she roamed more
than usual; she carried her sombre spirit from one famil-
iar shrine to the other. Even when Pansy and the Countess
were with her she felt the touch of a vanished world. The
carriage, leaving the walls of Rome behind, rolled through
narrow lanes where the wild honeysuckle had begun to
tangle itself in the hedges, or waited for her in quiet places
where the fields lay near, while she strolled further and fur-
ther over the flower-freckled turf, or sat on a stone that had
once had a use and gazed through the veil of her personal
sadness at the splendid sadness of the scene-at the dense,
warm light, the far gradations and soft confusions of colour,
the motionless shepherds in lonely attitudes, the hills where

732 The Portrait of a Lady