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96 and sat for an hour at a time listening to nightingales and watching browsing deer. She never failed to visit a residence that lay on her road, and as soon as she arrived at a place she inquired punctiliously whether there were any fine country-seats in the neighborhood. In this fashion she spent a whole summer. Through the autumn she continued to wander restlessly; she visited, on the Continent, a hundred watering-places and travelers resorts. The beginning of the winter found her in Rome, where she confessed to extreme fatigue and determined to seek repose.

"I am weary, weary," she said to her companion. "I didn't know how weary I was. I feel like sinking down in this City of Rest, and resting here for ever."

She took a lodging in an old palace, where her chamber was hung with ancient tapestries, and her drawing-room decorated with the arms of a pope. Here, giving way to her fatigue, she ceased to wander. The only thing she did was to go every day to St. Peter's. She went nowhere else. She sat at her window all day with a big book in her lap, which she never read, looking out into a Roman garden at a fountain plashing into a weedy alcove, and half a dozen nymphs in mottled marble. Some times she told her companion that she was happier this way than she had ever been,—in this way, and