She lifted her face to the huge open circle at the center of the dome high over her head. Quiet strength came into her heart from those great gray stones. Century after century they had enclosed that lovely circle of open sky and sunlit cloud and swallow-flights. Every other ancient roof in Rome had gone down to heaps of rubbish, save only this, steadfast, enduring, letting in the innocent clear light of every day down to the heart of the old temple. Daylight--that was what made the Pantheon a place apart for her--honest daylight. How cheap beside it was the theatrical yellow of the windows back of the altar in St. Peter's! She looked about her for a place to sit, and, seeing no chair, took a prie-dieu and sank to her knees on it as though she were praying. She was praying in her way. She continued to look up at the heaped golden clouds, at the infinite depth of the blue, blue sky, at the ineffable clarity of the light, pouring in through the great round opening. It seemed to smile at her, an honest, loving, reassuring smile that flooded her vexed, somber heart as it flooded the somber, ancient building. What strength, what strength in those gray stones, to hold together where everything else had been broken and dispersed! How beautiful primitive things were! How consoling and healing--the hardness and strength of stones, the clarity of light, the transparency of the sky! If you could only somehow make your life up of such things--strength, sunshine, simplicity--and music! She continued to gaze up, her hands clasped. Yes, she was praying, she was praying for a little share of all that. * * * * * What was that absurd Mr. Livingstone saying? Marise glanced up sharply from her book and listened. Why, he was talking about Crittenden's--old Mr. Crittenden dead and had left that lovely old mountain home to some indifferent nephew? To make sure, she put her book down and asked a question or two. How strange that she should be talking about _Ashley_ to people here in a Roman _pension_! Ashley! Crittenden's! Cousin Hetty! She seemed to have gone again back to her book, but she was not reading. She was looking at a sunlit green valley, a white road winding through it, a glass-clear little river chanting under willows, low, friendly homes under tall elms, ugly old people with plain speech and honest, quiet eyes, smiling down lovingly on a skipping, frisking little girl. "... I see them shining plain, The happy highways where I went And may not go again." After a time she closed her book and went up on the roof for a quiet moment alone, to go back to Ashley, to look at those blue, remembered hills.