It is a drive of about five miles from the railway station to Sant' Ambrogio, and the road winds across the plain, sometimes rising and falling, always leading towards the rim of interfolding hills. In the vineyards the vines, naked at first glance, were just beginning to flower, and the rows of pollarded planes from which they were festooned showed a glory of young leaf. The maize was a couple of feet in height, and where the sun shone through the blades of it they looked like thin green flames. The heat was intense, and the air seemed stifled with the subtle smell of the dust that lay thickly over the road and powdered the grassy edges. The whole plain of Tuscany, apparently empty of human life, and consequently filled with a sense of utter peace, seemed a vast green platter brimming with a divine ether and held up towards the heavens by the steady hands of genii. Only Sophia's carriage showed like a black insect winging a course fast enough to itself but slow to the gaze of any being who, looking down on this dish held for the gods, could see the whole expanse of it at once. Everywhere was a sense of light--light steeping the sky, drenching the earth, and vibrating in the spaces between; light that gave a gracious blur to edges, that refracted from each subtle difference of plane and angle; light that permeated the very shadows so that they seemed semi-transparent. One with this sense of light, as body is one with soul, was the sense of colour--tender greens, at once pure and delicate; blues that paled to the merest breath or merged in a soft purple. The wideness of the view gave full value to the exquisitely fine curves which composed it--the curves of outline where hills and long sweeping slopes came against the sky, and the curves of surfaces, which inter-folded and led into each other like the waters of a vast lake where Time has stayed his foot and the spellbound water holds for ever the slopes and gradations blown into being by an arrested wind. Something--an emotion impersonal in itself yet arousing the personality in her--began to stir at Sophia's heart; then, as the carriage rounded a curve in the road and she received the shock of Sant' Ambrogio against the distant arch of the sky, sudden tears burned in her eyelids. Leaning back as well as she could against the uncompromising cushions, she gazed from between lids half-closed so as to narrow her vision on the one thing.