From Milan they went on in due time to Florence. There they stopped less long, for opportunities of learning were not by any means so good as at Milan and Naples. But those few short weeks in the City of the Soul were to Linnet as a dream of some artistic Paradise; they made her half forget, for the moment at least, her lost English lover—and her husband’s presence. The Duomo, the Palazzo Vecchio, the Loggia, the Piazza, the old bridge across the Arno, the enchanted market-place; Michael Angelo’s tomb, Giotto’s crusted campanile! What hours she spent, entranced, in the endless halls of the Uffizi and the Pitti; what moments of hushed awe and rapt silence of soul before the pallid Fra Angelicos in the dim cells of San Marco. Ach, Gott, it was beautiful! Linnet gazed with the intense delight of her mountain nature at Raphael’s Madonnas and Andrea’s Holy Families; she stood spellbound before the exquisite young David of the Academia; she wandered with a strange thrill among the marvellous della Robbias and Donatellos of the Bargello. The Tyrolese temperament is before all things artistic. A new sense seemed quickened within Linnet’s soul as she trod those glorious palaces instinct with memories of the Medici and their compeers. A great thirst for knowledge possessed her heart. She read as she had never known how to read before. That Florentine time was as her freshman year in the splendid quadrangles of this Italian Oxford. Then Rome—the Vatican, the Colosseum, the monuments, St Peter’s, the loud organs, the singing boys, the incense, the purple robes and mitres, the great guttering candles! All that could awake in unison every chord of religion and its sister art, in that simple religious artistic nature, was there to gratify her! It was glorious! it was wonderful! So her winter passed away, her first winter with Andreas; she was learning fast, both with eye and with ear, all that Italy and its masters could possibly teach her.