In her sunny room overlooking the city, in the intervals between her rambles, or the interchange of visits, she spent quiet happy hours. In Rome, as in no other Italian city, time slipped back, and the life of twenty years ago seemed often more real, more tangible, than her existence of to-day.
Over and over again, in Rome, she was startled to find herself living not in the present, but in the memory of an unforgetable past.
One morning, in walking through the Farnesina Palace, she stopped before a window to look down upon a narrow walled garden. The paths were mossy and weed-grown; the whole place pervaded by that air of neglect and decay, common to Italian gardens. But at the end of the enclosed oblong space, there was a beautiful old gate of marble. Orange trees in rows, ran the length of the right-hand wall, and between the glossy leaves, the fruit shone golden. In the centre grass plot, amidst the long unkempt grass, there were rose bushes with pale pink monthly roses upon them; and overhead a roof of sky blue as the heart of a gentian.
Miss Page turned her head quickly, a half smile upon her lips, as though to speak to some one at her side.
It was twenty years since she had looked down upon that quiet garden, but the illusion of a bygone day was so strong, that she expected to meet a responsive smile.
The summer of which François Fontenelle had spoken to his friend, as he sat beneath Anne’s portrait, was the summer which followed her visit to her brother and his wife.
Anne had returned with her inner life wrecked and shattered. Her peace of mind was gone. She spent no more quiet days in the library with her books. A feverish restlessness drove her out of doors, where while daylight lasted, she worked among her plants, digging, weeding, planting with such energy that from sheer physical fatigue, she forced herself to sleep dreamlessly till morning renewed her toil. She was uninterrupted. No one disturbed her. She had nothing else to do.
In spite of her protestations, Mrs. Burbage who had been growing steadily feebler through the winter, sent for a hospital nurse, and finally kept her bed.
“I will be looked after by the right people,” she declared with characteristic determination. “Trained nurses are the right people to tend the sick. I can afford to pay for them, and I will have them. You have had enough waiting upon invalids, my dear.”