The two women then digressed upon various gossiping particulars, as they sat on the old mossy, grass-grown steps, looking up over house-tops yellow with lichen, into the blue spring air, where flocks of white pigeons were soaring and careering in the soft, warm sunshine. Brightness and warmth and flowers seemed to be the only idea natural to that charming weather, and Elsie, sad-hearted and foreboding as she was, felt the benign influence. Rome, which had been so fatal a place to her peace, yet had for her, as it has for every one, potent spells of a lulling and soothing power. Where is the grief or anxiety that can resist the enchantment of one of Rome's bright, soft, spring days? CHAPTER XXIX. THE NIGHT-RIDE. The villa of the Princess Paulina was one of those soft, idyllic paradises which lie like so many fairy-lands around the dreamy solitudes of Rome. They are so fair, so wild, so still, these villas! Nature in them seems to run in such gentle sympathy with Art that one feels as if they had not been so much the product of human skill as some indigenous growth of Arcadian ages. There are quaint terraces shadowed by clipped ilex-trees whose branches make twilight even in the sultriest noon; there are long-drawn paths, through wildernesses where cyclamens blossom in crimson clouds among crushed fragments of sculptured marble green with the moss of ages, and glossy-leaved myrtles put forth their pale blue stars in constellations under the leafy shadows. Everywhere is the voice of water, ever lulling, ever babbling, and taught by Art to run in many a quaint caprice,--here to rush down marble steps slippery with sedgy green, there to spout up in silvery spray, and anon to spread into a cool, waveless lake, whose mirror reflects trees and flowers far down in some visionary underworld. Then there are wide lawns, where the grass in spring is a perfect rainbow of anemones, white, rose, crimson, purple, mottled, streaked, and dappled with ever varying shade of sunset clouds. There are soft, moist banks where purple and white violets grow large and fair, and trees all interlaced with ivy, which runs and twines everywhere, intermingling its dark, graceful leaves and vivid young shoots with the bloom and leafage of all shadowy places. In our day, these lovely places have their dark shadow ever haunting their loveliness: the malaria, like an unseen demon, lies hid in their sweetness. And in the time we are speaking of, a curse not less deadly poisoned the beauties of the Princess's villa,--the malaria of fear.