"So good-bye to it all, but not good-bye to Sophia. Dear, I believe very strongly in spiritual converse (I can't find the word I want for it). But don't you feel that my arms _are_ round you? I can feel your head on my shoulder and your hair against my cheek. I mean that it isn't just cheating oneself with vain imaginations to meet like that. I mean to go on thinking of you hard and the vision soothes, not aggravates, the longing, and I will meet you like that at our Castello di Luna. But oh, my dear, I wish it were really true _now_! There is so much I want from you and must go on wanting. Come to me in thought, my sweet, until we can see and touch and hear each other again. We will always say to each other whatever is in our hearts and minds. And so I'm just starting to go back--Sophia, I can't say 'home.' Home means what you are. Oh, I thought I should go back gaily and take it all up, but it makes me sick with dread. I ought never to have got out of harness. It's better to go on till one drops than to taste freedom and have to give it up. Sweet, your eyes and your mouth and your hair are with me always. Don't call me a materialist, and say it's only your body's beauty that I value. You're sweet to me through and through. Oh, Sophia, come often to meet me in Monte Luna. And there is Lucia to say sweet, impossible things to make us dream. _Ti bacio gl'occhi._ "RICHARD." Sophia opened the last sheet of paper. It enfolded three primroses, and on it was written "_Primavere per la Primavera_." She looked at them a moment, then wrapped them up again and put letters and flowers back in the bag. Behind her the sun was near to setting, and the blaze of it lay full on the towers, making them a bright tawny-grey against the sky of deep steel-colour, and turning to tongues of flame the tufts of yellow gillyflowers--Santa Beata's own plant--that sprang out here and there from the sheer masonry. Some jackdaws flew out of the nearest belfry, and circled round it, black amid the brightness. Sophia sprang up and walked to and fro. "I shall feel again, if I stay here. Unbearably. I wish I hadn't come. I'll go away to-morrow. _Richard, Richard, Richard!_" But on the morrow, instead of leaving Sant' Ambrogio, Sophia moved from the inn to the little house in the walled garden. Not until she was installed there did she discover that though the house was comparatively modern, the garden was the very one where Santa Beata had seen her visions and dreamed her dreams. III The first morning she spent in the place in the wall, writing him a letter.