"I tell you," he said, determined to believe it, "that you are the very bath of my tired spirit." "How kind you are!" she said. "You're as kind to me as if you were my brother. Sometimes I think you are rather like my brother. I never _had_ a brother, but you're very like, I think, the one I would have had if I had had one." She warmed to the idea. "I feel as if my brother--" she said, preparing to launch into enthusiasm; but he interrupted her by getting up. "It seems waste," he said, reaching for his hat, "to talk about your brother, as you've never had him. Shall we go?" She jumped up at once with the air of one released. He himself could not any longer endure the tea-room or he would have stayed in it. Gloomily he went out with her into the streets again and noted that if anything she seemed more active and eager than before--thoroughly, indeed, rested and refreshed. Gloomily he realised during the next hour or two that she had an eye for buildings, and that they were always the wrong ones. Gloomily he discovered an odd liking in her for anything, however bad, that was wrought in iron. He could not get her past some of the iron gates of the palaces. He hated bad gates. Without experience she could not compare and did not select, and her interest was all-embracing, indiscriminating as a child's. He took pains to avoid the Piazza del Duomo, but by some accident of a twisting street and a momentary inattentiveness he did find himself at last, after much walking as he had thought away from it, all of a sudden facing it. Urging her on by her elbow he hurried her nervously across it, hoping she would not see the Cathedral; but the Cathedral being difficult not to see she did see it, and remained, as he had feared she would, rooted. "Ingeborg," he exclaimed, "if you tell me you like that--" "Oh, let me look, let me look," she cried, holding his sleeve while he tried to get her away. "It's so funny--it's so _different_--" "Ingeborg--" he almost begged; but from its outside to its inside was an inevitable step, and that she should gasp on first getting in seemed also, after she had done it, inevitable. Ingram found himself sight-seeing; looking at windows; following her down vaults; towed by beadles. He rubbed his hand violently over his hair. "But this is intolerable!" he cried aloud to himself. "I shall go mad--" And he strode after her and caught her arm just as she was disappearing over the brim of the crypt. "Ingeborg," he said, his eyes blazing at her in a bright astonishment, "do you mean to tell me that I shall not reach _you_, that I'm not going to get ever at _you_ till I paint you?" She turned in the gloom and looked up at him. "Oh, I know I'll get you then," he went on excitedly, while the interrupted beadle impatiently rattled his keys. "Nothing can hide you away from me then. I don't paint, you see, by myself--" She stared up at him.