Her hand went out to the little hanging bag she carried and drew back again, then setting her mouth, she made herself unfasten the clasp and take out a bundle of letters which she laid on the seat beside her. As her eyes lit on the familiar writing a deadly nausea took hold of her, she felt physically sick and put her hand up to her throat to check its contraction. A letter from him always affected her in that way, so that she sat, sick and faint, unable to open it, and now these oft-read letters were as potent as ever. She noted with a vague, impersonal surprise that her hands were shaking, and folding them in her lap she sat still, forcing her thoughts, in spite of the pain it stirred in her, to go back over the past two weeks. II On looking back the whole time seemed set in a clear, sunlit atmosphere of its own as in a magic sphere where the present had always taken a more than normal clearness of edge and the past and future ceased to be. It struck her as curious that the prevailing note of those weeks should have been a sense of utter peace; not realizing that, peace being the thing his frayed nerves craved, she therefore supplied it, wrapping him round with it, living so in him and for him that while with him she received the impression of peace herself, only having sensations of her own when they were apart. His need--that was the great thing, and though she had not stopped to analyse what his need was, she had felt it was for soothing and rest. She was a writer, and on the money made by her first book she came to Italy, and in Florence she met him, a painter of some note, of whom she had vaguely heard in London. Although he was twenty years older than she, their minds chimed from the first; one of them had only to half say a thing for the other to understand it. At the beginning there was nothing between them but friendship, tinged--though for her quite unconsciously--with the element of sex. For him, he had since told her, things were very different from the moment he met her; to the average woman the term "physical attraction" is so meaningless that she stared in uncomprehension when he told her how profoundly she had troubled him from the first. For this girl, whose pulses had never been fluttered to quickness, and who, though in imagination she could project herself into passion, always shrank from any sign of it in actuality, was reserved the doubtful compliment of stirring the passionate side of the man's nature more violently than it had ever been before. He kept the ugly thing well hidden, and she never guessed at it until her own pity and trust and affection made her unwittingly tempt him beyond endurance. Pity, allied to the intellectual pleasure they took in each other, moved her first, for he was unhappy, and she, too, had the habit of pain. She remembered the first whole day they had taken together; how they climbed up to San Miniato and found a field in which they lay and talked, and