It was as she had expected. At first, and for some little time after they had set off, he continued to be sad and silent. Minna could have been the same, but she made an effort, put it aside, and when they at last got into the open country, and into one of the campagna roads, she roused her companion, by asking him what was this or that object which they were passing or approaching. Gradually he also roused, his enthusiasm kindled; he began to relate the history of first one thing and then another. Then by-and-by, when they had left behind them every trace of the city, and were out on the open campagna, they began to feel its influence--its melancholy grandeur, its solitude, its majesty. Their driver, who knew his way well, took them, at Minna’s desire, as much out of the beaten track as possible; and before they arrived at the villa they had traversed roads on which she had never been before. They were all known, however, to her companion, who explained them to her, with their bearing and connection with other roads, all with the most minute and perfect exactness. The clouds gradually grew more white and less black; then by degrees unfolded, spread away and rolled aside, leaving great expanses of the blue peculiar to those skies and to no others. The exulting song of larks was everywhere. Dainty small flowers of every shape and every hue, veritable lilies of the field, carpeted the grass at either side of the road. Brilliant little green lizards sunned themselves on large gray stones and fragments of walls and tombs, whose mystery no man should ever unravel. Now and then a flock of sheep in charge of some dark-faced herdsman with a gleaming smile looked up in mild but not alarmed astonishment as they drove by. Turning her head, and looking behind her, Minna saw where the great city lay in the distance, gray or purple or blue, as the clouds shifted and the light flashed or faded; dim but mighty, with misty-looking domes and cupolas confusedly raising themselves from the general mass, and seeming to beckon back into their charmed circle those who ventured to break forth from it. She had fled from it all this morning, feeling as if one only of the many wickednesses which it sheltered, which were perpetrated within its walls--the one blot upon its splendour which happened to have come under her own eyes had darkened it for ever to her; but now, despite this feeling which was still there, she felt her heart-strings drawn, as they ever were, by a longing which amounted to pain, as she saw that vague outline in the distance, of the great empress-queen of all cities, past, present, and to come, shrunken from her former dimensions, stripped of her former splendour, modernized, vulgarized, patronized (as her companion had once so bitterly complained) by hordes of the curious and pleasure-seeking leisured classes of the world, but matchless still, supreme and imperial still.