Regina descended, almost running. She penetrated under an archway and paused, checked by a sudden chill. A priest passed close to her, black and fluttering, like a melancholy bird. She moved on, opened her guide-book, but did not read. Play of sun and shade painted the background of the Colosseum's immense emptiness. The walls, dotted with wild plants and yellow flowers, suggested a mountain-side; shady corners, green with moss, seemed little damp pastures; mysterious caverns opened great black mouths. Hoarse cawing of rooks came from behind the huge blue eyes which the great sphinx fixed on its own ruin. From the hopeless profundity of heaven rained a dream of solitude and death. "I have never cared for history," thought Regina. "There are persons who come miles to gush about a stone on which possibly some Roman warrior set his dirty foot! That seems silly to me. Why? A stone is for me only a stone! Nothing speaks to me by its past, but by its present significance. The past is death; the present is life. Here am I, and here once laboured twelve thousand slaves--or how many was it?" (Again she opened the guide-book, but did not read.) "Here the lions devoured the Christians, and cruel eyes of emperors, women, plebeians, with less conscience than the lions, enjoyed the horrid spectacle. But all that is past, and it doesn't move me a bit. Oh, dear! Here come the foreigners, bursting into this dream of death, chattering like ducks in a stagnant pond! Let me escape!" She went away. The Palatine trees trembled in the breeze against a sky ever brighter and brighter. The campanile of Santa Francesca Romana was clear-cut, bright, and dark. The Arch of Constantine framed the bright picture of the roadway with its background of silvery cloud. Regina followed the road and seated herself on the highest step of the stair of San Gregorio. Everything she could see in front of her, from the pine-trees, noisy with birds, to the rosy vision of the city's edge, all was light, life, joy; behind her, in the damp cloister, green with moss, in the portico guarded by tombs, in the abandoned garden, all was silence, sadness, death. Always the great contrast! Vibrating with life, she nevertheless entered into that place of death and allowed herself to be taken round by a friar, who seemed a skeleton wrapped in a yellow tunic. They visited the chapels, in whose silence the beautiful figures of Domenichino and Guido grow pale, like persons condemned to solitude. Regina crossed the desolate garden and watched the friar, with profound pity, wondering he could still walk, though he was dead to life. She thought of her baby, the little Caterina. Ah! she should be taught to appreciate, to enjoy, to adore life! "How many dead people there are in the world!" she thought. "I myself was dead till a few months ago. Now I have revived a little, but I am not so much alive as my baby shall be! I am only a resuscitated person with the memory of the grave still in my soul."