After two years of absence from her and utter silence, I could drag out of my memory no pictures of her save old ones, and one by one I brought them forth, my favorite portraits, and saw her sitting in the carved chair pouring tea or driving down the Avenue, very still and very straight in her victoria. She must be in New York, I said, for in late October she would be hurrying back to town for the old futile routine. I went on, recklessly fancying Penelope leading that life, dancing, dining and driving, as though this were all in the world she could possibly be doing. I knew that she had not married Talcott. I had learned this much of her from a stray newspaper which announced the breaking of the engagement. I knew that it could make no difference to me if she had married some one else. That was highly possible, yet it was not a possibility on which I cared to dwell in my moments of rumination. This day my mind dwelt on it, whether I would or not. Over the plain, just beyond the mountains, I saw Penelope in my visionary eye, and I asked myself if I should find another in that coveted place from which I was barred. A bit of land, a bit of sea, and there was home. In a few hours the same sun would be smiling on it. At that moment I dreaded to go on. It was my duty, yet, could I, I would have turned back to the Sudan, to ride again over the yellow sands in the dust of marching regiments. I wanted action. Poor, pitiful action it was to walk, but with every fall of my feet and every click of my cane I could say to myself that I was going home, to my boyhood's home, and it mattered little if I had no other. The clatter of the Corso jarred on me. My mood demanded quiet places. The little streets called to me from their stillness, and I answered them. They led me higher and higher to the summit of the town. I crossed a deserted piazza, and by a gentle slope was carried down to the terrace of the Porta Sola. There was in this secluded spot a soothing shade and silence. Old palaces, ghosts of another age, cast their shadows over it. Steps wound from its quiet, down the hill into the clatter of the lower town. A rampart guarded the sheer cliff, and with elbows resting there and chin cupped in my hands I looked away to the Apennines. Below me two arms of the town stretched out into the plain, but their mingling discords rose to my ear like the drum of insects. Beyond them, in the nearer prospect, the land seemed topsy-turvy, a maze of little hills and valleys. A pink villa flamed against the brown, and its flat, squat tower, glowing in the sunlight, called to its gaunt neighbor, rising from a deserted monastery, to cheer up and be merry with it. Distance levelled the land. It became broad plain, studded with gray villages and slashed by the Tiber; it rose to higher hills; then lifted sharply, the brown fading into the whiteness of massed mountain peaks.