Through southern France and northern Italy they wandered without fixed plans, going from place to place as humour seized them, seeking the sunshine. At last it seemed to be their normal existence. London with its pain and its passion grew remote like the remembered anguish of a dream. Few communications reached them. The local newspaper gave them all the tidings they needed of the great world. It was a life free from vexation. The decaying splendour of the larger cities with their treasure-houses of painting and sculpture and their majestic palaces profoundly stirred the young girl's imagination and widened her conceptions and sympathies. But she loved best to arrive by a crazy, old-world diligence at some little townlet built on a sunny hillside, whose crumbling walls were the haunts of lizards and birds and strange wild-flowers; and having rested and eaten at the dark little _albergo_, smelling of wine and garlic and all Italian smells, to saunter out with Jimmie through the narrow, ill-paved, clattering streets alive with brown children and dark-eyed mothers, and men sitting on doorsteps violently gesticulating and screaming over the game of _morra_, and to explore the impossible place from end to end. A step or two when they desired it would bring them to the sudden peace of the mediaeval church, with its memories of Romanesque tradition and faint stirrings of Gothic curiously reflecting the faith of its builders; the rough, weather-beaten casket of one flawless gem of art, a Virgin smiling over the child on her lap at many generations of worshippers, superbly eternal and yet quaintly woman. And then they would pass out of the chilly streets and down the declivitous pathways below the town and sit together on the hillside, in a sun-baked spot sheltered from the wind. This Aline, vaguely conscious of the Infinite, called “hanging on the edge of Nowhere.” One day, on such a hillside Jimmie had been painting three brown-faced children whom he had cajoled into posing for him, while Aline looked on dreamily. The urchins, dismissed with a few halfpennies, bowed polite thanks, the two boys taking off their caps with the air of ragged princes, and scampered away like rabbits out of sight. “There!” cried Jimmie, throwing down his brush and holding out the little panel at arm's length. “I have never done anything so good in all my life! Have n't I got it? Is n't it better than ten cathedralfuls of sermons? Is n't it the quintessence of happiness, the perfect trust in the sweet earth to yield them its goodness? Could any one after seeing that dare say the world was only a dank and dismal prison where men do nothing but sit and hear each other groan? Look at it, Aline. What do you think of it?” “It's just lovely, Jimmie,” said Aline. “If I painted a pink hippopotamus standing on its head, you would say it was lovely. Why did n't you tell me that arm was out of drawing?” He took up his brush and made the necessary correction. Aline laughed.