This time she sought for, and found another book. After adjusting the spring, and locking the writing part of the piece of furniture, she thrust this volume, without looking at it, deep into her nearly filled trunk.
VIII
Anne always returned with pleasure to Rome, a city which she knew well, and to which she was bound by many memories. She settled down happily with her maid in the little hotel in the heart of the city, at which she frequently stayed.
It had been chosen chiefly on account of the garden which her rooms overlooked—one of those charming Roman gardens, full of orange-trees in tubs, of oleanders, and of clambering vines.
A fountain splashed in the midst, and the sound of its falling water was music in her ears.
The deep blue sky, the dazzling sunshine never ceased to fill her with a sense of buoyancy and youth, and all her wanderings to distant churches, to ruined temples; amongst pictures, and statues, were a delight.
One morning, when she had tired herself by a long ramble through the halls and corridors of the Vatican, she returned with the determination to do nothing for the rest of the day, but read and be lazy.
She went to her room after lunch, her mind filled with the beauty of the Borgia rooms in which she had just lingered.
The ribbed ceilings, rich with the gorgeous colour of the emblems and coats-of-arms of the princely house, the marble pavements, the lofty windows, formed the empty frame into which her fancy painted pictures of the scenes those rooms had beheld. She heard the rustle of dresses stiff with gold and gems; she caught the backward glance of many a face; the face of Isabella d’Este, of Beatrice, of Lucrezia, framed in the golden hair she washed so frequently, and tended with such care.
“What’s become of all the gold