Page:Her Roman Lover (Frothingham, 1911).djvu/87

 you, you talk to me of old men on the walls of Troy. Are all Americans like you? What do such things mean except that you do not like me?”

The thin cracked voices of the priests continued from the chapel, and a cloud of incense rose from the swinging censers; but these things were becoming to the girl a little dreamlike, for there was genuine pain in the words of Curatulo.

Her aunt had moved away, pressing closer to the railing in order to see a mosaic over the altar.

“You know,” said Anne, “that I like you.”

She spoke with her profile toward him, but she felt that he looked at her, and without seeing, she felt the eagerness of that look.

“Then do something to please me. Let us be sometimes alone together. Let us visit the wonders of this city with no one by who talks of dates and the height of angels. And when we are tired of the city, let us go out to the Campagna Romana, which I will teach you to love as I love, for it is so beautiful and sorrowful and no other city in the world has such a setting. When we have driven out there, we will leave our carriage and walk over the fields to a little grove where the ilex trees stand closely together because the great plains about them are so bare; or we will go farther yet, to where the aqueducts have been standing for