They got out at the foot of a staircase that led up from the beach, and fastened their boat to an iron ring fixed in the gravel for that purpose. They went into the old Roman basilica, which contained some Byzantine frescoes, recently discovered under a thick coat of rough-cast, a chair of black marble, a sarcophagus and some frescoes by Ferrari and Luino. Because they had seen these at other times together, they visited them now without pleasure. Lovers must always have new sights, so much do they shrink from blunted sensations, for fear instinctively of wearying each other. Maurice and Edith preferred to explore this morning a narrow passageway that was quite new to them. The whole summit of this precipitous little island is covered with the buildings of a seminary that looks as if it were a fortress. The little road turned presently and led them abruptly up to a closed door. Their progress was blocked, and they found themselves face to face in the most utter isolation, shut in by two high walls and on an island. There could not have been a completer effect of isolation for them, of having no one besides themselves in the whole world. Surely this is the professed desire of lovers. One year ago they would have welcomed for all their lives an isolation like this. To-day, without a word, they turned and fled back to the beach. An old man was fishing with his line in the midday sun. Under a willow tree near the strand two barefooted children were playing ducks and drakes. Along the shore country houses appeared among the trees, whose leaves autumn was slowly garnishing with colour, and Orta, a mass of white, was reflected in the motionless lake. The spectacle of this calm and normal life in the midday stillness helped to restore their spirits. They ate their lunch on the steps of the stairway that led up to the basilica. Afterwards they floated here and there over the water for a part of the afternoon, seeking some place unknown to them in which they might revivify sensation. Finally they went back to the port, and once on shore again, still sought some new use to make of time. “Shall we go back to the hotel?” he asked, as they stood in the little square. But she protested against the idea of shutting themselves up in the house. “Oh, no! The sun is still high above the mountain. Let’s go back by the long way, and not hurry.” The road, after crossing through the town, which was quite destitute of sidewalks, ran along the shore of the lake, rising little by little from its level, and following the contours of the Sacred Mount, whose trees and chapels dominated the peninsula, past the iron gates or walls of villas, with ornamental palms and orange trees at their entrances. In front of one of these villas, a quite modest and shabby one, which they could see at the end of a short avenue through the open portals, Edith caught the smell of roses. “Wait,” she said to her lover. “They are so sweet, and they must be the last.”