Sant' Ambrogio is a little city of towers, some twenty of them, varying in height, all clustered together within the circling walls and pricking the sky like a group of tall-stemmed flowers in a garden. The town seems to have grown rather than been built on the crest of the only great hill for miles, but the ripples of the plain all converge towards it, leading the eye naturally up to this little crown of Tuscany. When they considered a tower a reminder of God, the ancients were not without a deeper spiritual foundation than they knew of; there is nothing of more direct psychological significance than line, and the many upward-springing lines of Sant' Ambrogio made it seem a thing so lightly poised as almost to be hanging from the heavens. A sense of something winged, which, though just resting on the earth, yet had plumes ready pricked for flight, impressed itself on Sophia's brain as she gazed. "This might have been beautiful for me if only I could still feel," was her swift thought, and she closed her eyes to let the gleam of light thus evoked sink into her mind. As she lay with her consciousness turned inwards, the deadened fibres of her began to stir; pain moved in its swoon, and, waking, took the keenest form of all--remembrance. Quite suddenly there flashed before her mental vision the loggia at the top of the old palace in Florence where she and Richard had said good-bye. She, who was to see the cords of passion grow slack, had there seen them stretched at their tensest, and the memory of it clutched at her heart with that pity for him which had kept her calm for his comfort. Now, mingled with it, was her own pain, which, at the time, her thought for him had overwhelmed. She saw again his face as she had seen it then--his thin, hawk-like profile dark and sharply-cut against the evening sky. With the memory of the pain that had gone through her at that moment, the power to feel stirred again, and it was that moment which struck at her anew. Her hands fastened suddenly on the hot sides of the carriage. "Oh, oh!" she said in the low voice that overwhelming sorrow can wring from the tongue, a soliloquy terrible in its unself-consciousness: "oh, oh! I can't bear it; I can't bear it!" As the horse slowed down at the beginning of the hill, the first poignancy of Sophia's reawakened feeling passed off, and she lay back, her hands laying palm upwards in her lap. With entry into the town came coolness; the ancient architects of the South knew better than to favour the broad streets planned by their descendants, and the narrow ways threaded so cunningly between the tall cliffs of houses were cool as shadowed streams. The greyness of the paved street fell like a suggestion of peace on Sophia after the searching sunlight of the plain, and the acuteness of her mental trouble subsided in response to the sense of physical ease; she had regained her grip of herself when the carriage drew up at the door of the Albergo Santo Spirito.