There were other, darker memories in her solitary wanderings. She returned sometimes to the hill behind the Villa Medici. She lingered in the dusty road outside the Benedictine monastery, and peered through the iron gate, gazing into the desolate garden, where only the utilitarian portion was cared for, and where shrubs, grass, and the sparse winter flowers languished in neglect, where the gloomy cypresses stood darkly out against the mouldering plaster on the wall; the prison gate, within which she had seen her lover sitting by the dying fire, a melancholy figure, with brooding eyes that refused to look at her. "It would have been better for us both if he had stayed there," she thought. "If we had been true to ourselves we should have parted at the door of his prison for ever. It would have been better for us both--better and happier. The cloister for him and for me. A few years of silence and solitude. A few years of penitential pain; and then the open gate, and the Good Shepherd's welcome to the lost sheep." Yes, it would have been better. No pure and abiding joy had come to her from her union with her lover. They had loved each other with a love that had filled the cup of life in the first years of their marriage; they had loved each other, but it had been with a passion that needed the stimulus of an unceasing change of pleasures to keep it alive; and when the pleasures grew stale, and there were no more new things or new places left in the world, their love had languished in the grey atmosphere of thought.