They went to question the Concierge of trains to Palermo. He took it as a personal grief that they must leave Taormina so soon. “The air of Palermo 63is not like ours.” They hoped it was not, as they shivered in a cold blast from the open door, and put it to him that they could hardly live on air alone, and that Taormina offered them nothing more. But he had something to suggest—furnished rooms that he had heard that a German shop-keeper wished to let. Peripatetica did not take to the suggestion kindly, in fact her aristocratic nose quite curled up at it. But she assented dejectedly that they might as well walk there as anywhere, and give the place a look. Through the dust and shrivelled almond blossoms they trailed back into town. The sun was still behind grey clouds and an icy wind whipped up the dust. “Too late for the almond bloom, too early for warmth. What is the right moment for Sicily?” murmured Peripatetica. The mountains with their sweeping curves into the sea were undeniably beautiful; the narrow town street they entered through the battlemented gate was full of gay colour, but it left them cold and homesick for Calabria. A little old Saracen palace, with some delicate Moorish windows and mouldings still undefaced, held the antiquity shop of the Frau Schuler. Brisk and rosy she seemed indeed the “trustable person” of the Concierge’s description. Yes, indeed, she had rooms and hoped they might please the ladies. Her niece would show them. A white-haired loafer was beckoned from the Square, and Peripatetica and Jane turned over to his guidance. Behind his faded blue linen back they threaded their way between the swarming tourists, children, panniered donkeys, and painted carts. 64Suddenly the old man vanished into a crack between two houses, which turned out to be an alley, half stair, half gutter, dropping down to lower levels. Everything no longer needed in the kitchen economy of the houses on either side had been cast into the alley—the bones of yesterday’s dinners, vegetable parings of to-day’s, the baby’s bath, the father’s old shoes lay in a rich ooze through which chickens clucked and squabbled. At the bottom of the crack a high wall and a pink gateway ... they were in a delicious garden, descending a pergola of roses and grapes. Violets and freesias, geraniums and heliotrope spread in a dazzle of colour and sweetness under gnarled olives and almonds and blossoming plums; stone benches, bits of old marbles, a violet-fringed pool and a terrace leading down to a square white house, a smiling young German girl inviting them in, and then a view—dazzling to even their fatigued, dulled eyes.