The ribbed ceilings, rich with the gorgeous colour of the emblems and coats-of-arms of the princely house, the marble pavements, the lofty windows, formed the empty frame into which her fancy painted pictures of the scenes those rooms had beheld. She heard the rustle of dresses stiff with gold and gems; she caught the backward glance of many a face; the face of Isabella d’Este, of Beatrice, of Lucrezia, framed in the golden hair she washed so frequently, and tended with such care. “_What’s become of all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms?_” Browning’s words had come to Anne’s mind as she stood for a moment alone in one of the ante-chambers, and glanced about her as though expecting it to be full of ghosts. She wondered how many of these golden-haired women had loved the painted walls upon which her eyes now rested. Those wonderful frescoes of Pinturicchio with their background of valley and mountain, and their flower-starred meadows; their animals and birds, their fantastic towers, their dainty figures, fanciful and charming as a fairy tale. She hoped they had loved them, and praised the painter with their sweetest smiles. Outside in the garden, the fountain splashed in the sunshine, and suddenly its melody was the melody of her own fountain in her own English garden at home. She thought of it lovingly, and planned a new hedge of briar-roses in the sunny corner where the dovecote stood. Gradually the memory of the garden filled her mind, and blotted out the stately visions of palaces and princes. It grew peopled with well-known figures, with men who twenty years ago had walked with her across its green lawn, had sat with her under its trees, laughing, talking, reading, sometimes, but rarely silent. Presently she rose, and took from a locked drawer the book she had brought from home, and till this moment, forgotten. Sitting in the sunshine, with the splash of the fountain sounding in her ears, Anne opened it. “_March 3._ Hugh came home last November to marry Alice,” were the first words that met her eyes. “They have taken a little furnished cottage by the sea, at St. Margaret’s Bay near Dover, and they want me to stay with them before they sail for New Zealand. Mrs. Burbage says of course I must go, and I start to-morrow to be with them for a fortnight. I long to see Hugh again, but I’m shy at the thought of meeting his wife. I have never seen her.” Except for the mention of her return to Fairholme Court, there was nothing written in the book from that date, till May of the same year, and the painful colour crept into Anne’s face as she noticed this. There was no need for written record. Clearly, as though she had recently lived through the experience, she remembered that fortnight’s visit.