It was a generous, an unselfish, almost an heroic thought, and it grew apace with her, as a sweet herb grows in a good soil, and the very pain it gave her stung her into pursuance of it. She had never been beyond the limits of the Gandolfo Woods since she had been brought under their broad green shadows one burning July day in her tenth year; but she knew well where her birthplace lay, to the north-east after crossing the last boundary of Le Selve. Pilgrims through many a century had come and gone in one continuous stream from that little walled city of the Popes to the greater Urbs on Tiber; but now the Popes go no more to Viterbo, and the sand chokes its fountains; and the course of life flows away from it, and leaves it like them dry and silent. This she did not know. It was to her the city of her childhood; the city of winged angels and clustering seraphim, and heavenly choirs and miracles and benedictions. She had no knowledge of its great past; of its fine art, of its sacred memories; but she loved it because there she had known a mother’s love, there had made a mother’s grave. In her solitary musings, during her long hours of toil, the resolution matured with her. Viterbo seemed, in her recollection of the long journey from it, immeasurably far off, far as the very moon itself. But from shepherds and cattle-drivers she learned the way to take, out of the woods and northward, to join the great high-road. She walked nine miles, over hills and across streams, to meet the public vehicle as it passed on its way to Ronciglione, and thence went to Viterbo itself. She had only a few coins in her pocket, for it was only when she sold a little piece of hempen cloth of her own making that she got a trifle. But she had some black bread and two onions in a handkerchief, and she was used to meagre food. After the green shade of the forest, the cloud of dust upon the roads and the grey desolate streets seemed to her very dreary; the city she remembered with its dancing waters and its glancing spires seemed to have vanished. Was the Spirit of God here more truly than in the aisles of pine and ilex? It was twelve years since she had been in these stony places, and her bare feet, used to the moss and the turf, ached as they trod the granite of the streets. But the Duomo was there, the temple dedicated to St Laurence, where she had knelt when a little child at her mother’s side, whilst the music of the Kyrie Eleison poured overhead, in sounds, winged like birds, which floated to the roof and passed out heavenward.