Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/124

Rh treasure; the twilights spent in picture-like old chambers, where dames of high degree had made their winter-quarters, fragrant with flowers and quaint with old tapestries and porcelains; the evenings passed in a society which, too motley to be intimate, yet too personal to dare be witty, was gradually made more than endurable to her, by the sound of one voice for which she listened more often than she knew, by the sight of one face which grew more necessary to her than she was aware.

"If one could be only quite alone here it would be too charming," she thought, driving this morning, while the sun shone on the golden reaches of the river, and the softly-coloured marbles caught the light, and the picturesque old shops gleamed many-hued as harlequin under the beetling brows of projecting roofs, and the carved stone of dark archways.

But if she had looked close into her own heart she would have seen that the solitude of her ideal would have been one like the French poet's—solitude à deux.

She did not go, after all, to her visits; she went