Page:Master Eustace (1920).djvu/276

266 as well as sadder, and decidedly not so pretty. Her figure was meagre, her movements angular, her complexion, even, not so pure as he had fancied. After the first minute he avoided her eye; it made her uncomfortable. Her voice she scarcely allowed him to hear. The Professor, as usual, was serene and frigid, impartial and transcendental. There was a chill in the air, a shadow between them. Benvolio went so far as to wonder that he had ever found a charm in the young girl, and his present disillusionment gave him even more anger than pain. He took leave abruptly and coldly, and puzzled his brain for a long time afterward over the mystery of Scholastica's reserve.

The Countess had said that travelling was a test of friendship; in this case friendship (or whatever the passion was to be called) bade fair for some time to resist the test. Benvolio passed six months of the liveliest felicity. The world has nothing better to offer to a man of sensibility than a first visit to Italy during those years of life when perception is at its keenest, when discretion has arrived, and yet youth has not departed. He made with the Countess a long, slow progress through the lovely land, from the Alps to the Sicilian Sea; and it seemed to him that his imagination, his intellect, his genius, expanded with every breath and ripened with every glance. The Countess was in an almost equal ecstasy, and their sympathy