The next morning was a clear, glorious autumnal one; a white mist enveloped the valley, and covered the river and the fields which bordered it, and the long rows of poplars between which it flowed, while the tops of the hills stood out, clear and distinct, bathed in a flood of golden sunshine, and the sky above was like a sapphire for clearness and depth of hue. Sara drank in deep draughts of the sweet, bracing air, and as she looked around, her heart swelled within her, and an impulse which for months had slumbered–had been as though it had never inspired her, animated her once more–the desire, namely, to take her brush in her hand, and picture that scene as once she would have had great joy in doing. But after first arriving at _Mein Genügen_ she had had such an impulse often, and nothing had come of it; when she had tried to reduce it to action, she had been so disheartened with the dulness, the utter absence of life, of the old strength and craft, that it was now long since she had renewed the attempt. This morning, though the impulse was at first strong within her, she shook her head, and decided not to make an attempt which must end in disappointment. She opened her book, and tried to be interested in that. Soon the effort succeeded. It was an Italian history, which she had found amongst Falkenberg’s books, and the page at which she opened it pictured that scene in which _il rè galantuomo_, contrary to the advice of his great minister, and other wise and potent counsellors, had insisted on preserving in the speech from the throne which he was to utter on opening parliament, an allusion to the sufferings of his people, and his own sensibility to them. That ‘cry of anguish’–that _grido di dolore_ of which the King spoke, has now become historical. Sara did not remember even to have read of it before, or, if she had, she had passed it by, and forgotten it. What drew her attention to it on this occasion was a mark in pencil beside the sentence, and at the foot of the page, on the margin, the words, in her husband’s handwriting: ‘Surely a fine subject for a picture, treated either allegorically or literally.–R. F.’ Sara’s hands, with the book in them, sank gradually, and she raised her face, full of musing and reflection, towards the clear hill-tops, whose bases and all beneath were swathed in mist.