“Yes, I know I shall be better here. I feel better already,” said Isola, with a kind of feverish hopefulness. “It was so good of Martin to bring me. San Remo is always lovely--and I shall love it to the end of my life, because it was my first home in Italy--but I was beginning to be tired--not of the olive woods and the sea, but of the people we met, and the sameness of life. One day was so like another.” “It was monotonous, of course,” agreed Allegra; “and being a little out of health, you would be bored by monotony sooner than Martin or I. It was such a pity you did not like the yacht. That made such a change for us. The very olive woods and the mountain villages seem new when one sees them from the water. I was never tired of looking at the hills between San Remo and Bordighera, or the promontory of Monaco, with its cathedral towers. It was a pleasure lost to you, dear; but it could not be helped, I suppose. Yet once upon a time you used to be so fond of the sea, when you and I went in our row-boat, tempting danger round by Neptune Point.” “I may have been stronger then,” Isola faltered. “Oh, forgive me, darling! What an inconsiderate wretch I am! But Rome will give you back your lost strength; and we shall round Neptune Point again, and feel the salt spray dashing over our heads as we go out into the great fierce Atlantic. I confess that sometimes, when that divine Mediterranean which we are never tired of worshipping has been lying in the sunshine like one vast floor of _lapis lazuli_, I have longed for something rougher and wilder--for such a sea as you and I have watched from the Rashleigh Mausoleum.” Colonel Disney and his wife and sister went about in a very leisurely way in their explorations. In the first place, he was anxious to avoid anything approaching fatigue for his wife; and in the second place it was only the beginning of April, and they were to be in Rome for at least a month; there was therefore no need for rushing hither and thither at the tourist pace, with guide-books in their hands, and anxious, heated countenances, perspiring through the streets, and suffering deadly chills in the churches. Allegra’s first desire was naturally to see the picture-galleries, and to these she went for the most part alone, leaving Isola and her husband free to wander about as they pleased, upon a friendly equality of ignorance, knowing very little more than Childe Harold and Murray could teach them. Isola’s Rome was Byron’s Rome.