Villa Tuscolana, where some college was making their _villigiatura_. I showed him a few soldi, and he stopped and let me lift the leaves myself. There they lay with soft cheek pressed to cheek, large, black figs as sweet as honey. The very skins of them would have sweetened your tea. Where we stood a little path that looked like a dry rivulet-bed led off under the wall of the convent grounds. When I asked where it went, they answered, ‘To the Madonna.’ We will go there on our way down. Meantime, has Isabel nothing hospitable to say to us?” Miss Vane displayed immediately the luncheon she had been detailed to prepare, a bottle of Orvieto, only less delicate because richer than champagne, a basket of _cianbelli_, and lastly a box. “In the name of the prophet, figs!” she said, opening it. “They are dried, it is true; but then they are from Smyrna.” They drank _felicissima festa_ to Bianca, drank to the past and the present, to all the world; and Mr. Vane, when their little feast was ended, slipped a beautiful ring on his younger daughter’s finger. “To remember Tusculum by, my dear,” he said; and, looking at her wistfully, seeming to miss some light-heartedness even in her smiles, he added: “Is there anything you lack, child?” She dropped her face to his arm only in time to hide a blush that covered it. “What could I lack?” she asked. But a few minutes afterward, while the others recalled historical events connected with the place, and the Signora pointed out the cities and mountains by name, the young girl walked away to the Roman side, and stood looking off with longing eyes toward the west. She lacked a voice, a glance, and a smile too dear to lose, and her heart cried out for them. She was not unhappy, for she trusted in God, and in the friend whose unspoken affection absence and estrangement had only strengthened her faith in; but she wanted to see him, or, at least, to know how he fared. It seemed to her at that moment that if she should look off toward that part of the world where he must be, fix her thoughts on him and call him, he would hear her and come. She called him, her tender whisper sending his name out through all the crowding ghosts of antiquity, past pope and king and ambassador, poet and orator, armies thrust back and armies triumphant――the little whisper winged and heralded by a power older and more potent than Tusculum or the mountain whereon its ruins lie.