Page:Her Roman Lover (Frothingham, 1911).djvu/186



URING the weeks that followed, Margaret was forced to admit that if mutual comprehension was desirable it was not necessary to happiness. Since admitting her love for Gino, Anne had walked with him and seen him alone as freely as though she were at home, and her face when she came home from these walks, or when her aunt would find her alone in the great salon after he had left her, was pale and luminous; her eyes seemed to look without seeing, her ears to listen without hearing; and her smile, radiant and vague, was as that of some absent spirit wishing in its happiness to be gracious to every living thing, but held apart within a mystical orbit of its own joy.

It was cold in early January. The Italian sun rose every morning to find frost covering the grounds and shrubs of Roman gardens, and in her many fountains there was ice; but the sky was cloudless, and the snow-girded mountains on the north and west did little more than breathe over the Roman plains; so that roses still bloomed on