Somewhat later in the day, they went out for a stroll through the town together. To Herminia\'s great relief, Alan never even noticed she had been crying. Man-like, he was absorbed in his own delight. She would have felt herself a traitor if Alan had discovered it.
"Which way shall we go?" she asked listlessly, with a glance to right and left, as they passed beneath the sombre Tuscan gate of their palazzo.
And Alan answered, smiling, "Why, what does it matter? Which way you like. Every way is a picture."
And so it was, Herminia herself was fain to admit, in a pure painter\'s sense that didn\'t at all attract her. Lines grouped themselves against the sky in infinite diversity. Whichever way they turned quaint old walls met their eyes, and tumble-down churches, and mouldering towers, and mediaeval palazzi with carved doorways or rich loggias. But whichever way they turned dusty roads too confronted them, illimitable stretches of gloomy suburb, unwholesome airs, sickening sights and sounds and perfumes. Narrow streets swept, darkling, under pointed archways, that framed distant vistas of spire or campanile, silhouetted against the solid blue sky of Italy. The crystal hardness of that sapphire firmament repelled Herminia. They passed beneath the triumphal arch of Augustus with its Etruscan mason-work, its Roman decorations, and round the antique walls, aglow with tufted gillyflowers, to the bare Piazza d\'Armi. A cattle fair was going on there; and Alan pointed with pleasure to the curious fact that the oxen were all cream-colored,—the famous white steers of Clitumnus. Herminia knew her Virgil as well as Alan himself, and murmured half aloud the sonorous hexameter, "Romanos ad templa deum duxere triumphos." But somehow, the knowledge that these were indeed the milk-white bullocks of Clitumnus failed amid so much dust to arouse her enthusiasm. She would have been better pleased just then with a yellow English primrose.
They clambered down the terraced ravines sometimes, a day or two later, to arid banks by a dry torrent\'s bed where Italian primroses really grew, interspersed with tall grape-hyacinths, and scented violets, and glossy cleft leaves of winter aconite. But even the primroses were not the same thing to Herminia as those she used to gather on the dewy slopes of the Redlands; they were so dry and dust-grimed, and the path by the torrent\'s side was so distasteful and unsavory. Bare white boughs of twisted fig-trees depressed her. Besides, these hills were steep, and Herminia felt the climbing. Nothing in city or suburbs attracted her soul. Etruscan Volumnii, each lolling in white travertine on the sculptured lid of his own sarcophagus urn, and all duly ranged in the twilight of their tomb at their spectral banquet, stirred her heart but feebly. St. Francis, Santa Chiara, fell flat on her English fancy. But as for Alan, he revelled all day long in his native element. He sketched every morning, among the huddled, strangled lanes; sketched churches and monasteries, and portals of palazzi; sketched mountains clear-cut in that pellucid air; till Herminia wondered how he could sit so long in the broiling sun or keen wind on those bare hillsides, or on broken brick parapets in those noisome byways. But your born sketcher is oblivious of all on earth save his chosen art; and Alan was essentially a painter in fibre, diverted by pure circumstance into a Chancery practice.
The very pictures in the gallery failed to interest Herminia, she knew not why. Alan couldn\'t rouse her to enthusiasm over his beloved Buonfigli. Those naive flaxen-haired angels, with sweetly parted lips, and baskets of red roses in their delicate hands, own sisters though they were to the girlish Lippis she had so admired at Florence, moved her heart but faintly. Try as she might to like them, she responded to nothing Perugian in any way.
At the end of a week or two, however, Alan began to complain of constant headache. He was looking very well, but grew uneasy and restless. Herminia advised him to give up sketching for a while, those small streets were so close; and he promised to yield to her wishes in the matter. Yet he grew worse next day, so that Herminia, much alarmed, called in an Italian doctor. Perugia boasted no English one. The Italian felt his pulse, and listened to his symptoms. "The signore came here from Florence?" he asked.
"From Florence," Herminia assented, with a sudden sinking.
The doctor protruded his lower lip. "This is typhoid fever," he said after a pause. "A very bad type. It has been assuming such a form this winter at Florence."
He spoke the plain truth. Twenty-one days before in his bedroom at the hotel in Florence, Alan had drunk a single glass of water from the polluted springs tha............