Very often, it was true, she was joined in her watch by Colin; of whom, however, it never occurred to her to think under any other possible aspect than that of Arthur’s friend. It might as well have been Lauderdale who shared her anxieties, so far as that went--for, notwithstanding a certain proclivity on the part of Colin to female friendship, Alice was too entirely unconscious, too utterly devoid of any sense or feeling of self, to be interesting to the young man. Perhaps a certain amount of self-regard is necessary to attract the regard of others. Alice was not conscious of herself at all, and her insensibility communicated itself to her companion. He sometimes even wondered if her intelligence was up to the ordinary level, and then felt ashamed of himself when by chance she lifted upon him her wistful eyes; not that those eyes were astonishingly bright, or conveyed any intimations of hidden power--but they looked, as they were, unawakened, suggestive eyes, which might wake up at any moment and develop unthought-of lights. But, on the whole, this twilight was too dim to interest Colin, except by moments; and it was incomprehensible and to some extent provoking and vexatious to the young man, to see by his side a creature so young, and with so many natural graces, who neutralized them all by her utter indifference to herself. So that after all it came to be a very natural and reasonable step to accompany the Merediths, to whose knowledge of the country and language even Lauderdale found himself indebted when suddenly thrown without warning upon the tumultuous crowd of Leghorn boatmen, which was his first foreign experience. “They all understand French,” a benevolent fellow-passenger said, as he went on before them; which did not give the consolation it was intended to convey to the two Scotch travellers, who only looked at each other sheepishly, and laughed with a very mixed and doubtful sort of mirth, not liking to commit themselves. They had to give themselves up blindly into the hands of Meredith and his sister--for Alice felt herself of some importance in a country where she “knew the language”--and it was accordingly in the train of those two that Colin and Lauderdale were dragged along, like a pair of English captives, through the very gates of Rome itself, and across the solemn Campagna to the little city set upon a hill, to which the sick man was bound. They made their way to it in a spring afternoon when the sun was inclining towards the west, throwing long shadows of those long, weird, endless arches of the Claudian aqueduct across the green wastes, and shining full upon the white specks of scattered villages on the Alban hills. The landscape would have been impressive even had it conveyed no associations to the minds of the spectators. But, as the reluctant strangers left Rome, they saw unfold before them a noble semicircle of hills--the Sabines, blue and mysterious, on one side, the Latin range