Rome? Yes, in the November afternoons when the world outside her windows was hidden in grey fog, she longed for the beautiful city, the place of life and light, the city of fountains, full of the sound of rushing water. The dull greyness of London oppressed her, when she thought of the long garden walks in their solemn stillness, the cypress and ilex, the statues gleaming ghostly in the dusk against the dark walls of laurel and arbutus, the broad terrace with its massive marble balustrade, on which she had leant for hours in melancholy meditation, thinking, thinking, thinking, as the multitude of church towers and the great dome in the hollow below her changed from grey to purple, as the golden light died in the west and the young moon rose above the fading crimson of the afterglow. It was sad to think that she would never see that divine city again, and all that she had loved in Italy: Cadenabbia, where her honeymoon had begun, to the sound of rippling water, as the boats crept by in the darkness, to the music of guitars and Italian voices, singing in the light of coloured lanterns, while the cosmopolitan crowd clustered in the narrow space between the hotel and the lake. * * * * * Susan Amphlett came nearly every day, and insisted upon being admitted. She had come to London for a week, just to buy frocks for a winter round of visits. "But much more to see you, my dearest," she said, and then she recited the houses to which she was going, and her reason for going to them, which seemed to be anything rather than any regard for the people she was visiting. She talked of herself as if she had been a star actress. "I am touring in the shires this winter," she said. "I did Hants and Dorset last year, and was bored to extinction. Roger is happy in any hole if he can be riding to hounds every day, and he had the Blackmoor Vale and the North Hants within his reach most of the time; while I was excruciated by a pack of women who talked of nothing but their good works or their bridge, and they were such poor players that the good works were less boring than the bridge talk. 'Dear Lady Sue, would you call no trumps if?'--and would you do this and t'other? questions that babies in the nursery might ask over their toy cards." Then came a long account of the frocks that were being made for the shires, and the scarlet top-coat to be worn with a grey habit, which Roger hated. "I think he would like me in an early-Victorian get up, with the edge of my habit touching my horse's fetlocks, a large white muslin collar, and a low beaver hat with a long feather. Those early-Victorian collars cost two or three pounds apiece, my Grannie told me, and those poor wretches who never changed their clothes till dinner, wore them all day long; and yet they talk of _our_ extravagance; as if nobody paid anything for clothes in those days."