“Yes, it is a consolation,” said Richard, “so far as anything can console one for the loss of opportunities, the change of circumstances. I find it safer to say nothing on such subjects, and to live among people who know nothing; but now that I am forced to stand here again, to recollect all that might have been----” It was a still afternoon, the sun shining with lavish warmth and force, the grass growing, the leaves opening, so that you could almost see their silent haste of progress. They were standing on the terrace outside the windows, looking down over the brown woods all basking in the sunshine, to Esk, which showed here and there in a wider eddy of foam round some great boulder which interrupted his course. It was too early for the twitter of swallows; but some of those hardy birds that dwell all the year at home were interchanging their genial babble, deep among the multitudinous branches, and a few daring insects hummed in the air which was so full of sunshine. Floods of golden crocus had come out on all the borders. It was not the moment for recollection; but these words raised a swell and expansion of feeling in Mary’s heart which it was not safe to indulge. Soft moisture came to her eyes. Happily that rush of sensation was not strong enough to make her wretched, but it confused her so much that she could not reply. “All the same,” said Richard, quickly, “I do not agree with Browning in his rapture over an English spring. You should see Italy at this season: everything here is pale, a mere shadow of the radiance yonder. From Bellosguardo, for instance, looking down upon Florence; you have never been in Italy, Mary?--a sky to which this is darkness, air all lambent with light and warmth, such towers, such roofs rising up into it, and the Val-d’Arno stretching away in delicious distance, like the sea, as ignorant people say--as if the sea could ever be so full of grace and interest! It is, I suppose, the junction of art with exquisite nature which gives such a landscape its great charm. Here we have nature to be sure, pretty enough in its way; but everything that man touches is monstrous. Those square horrible houses! Happily we don’t see them here.” The soft flow of feeling which had risen in Mary’s mind, and had filled her eyes with moisture, suddenly turned into gall. “No,” she said, “I have never been in Italy. I don’t know that I want to go. I prefer to think my own country the most beautiful in the world.” “Well,” said Richard, “perhaps if you are obliged to live in it all your life it is the most philosophical way.”