Used to hang and brush their bosoms?”
Browning’s words had come to Anne’s mind as she stood for a moment alone in one of the ante-chambers, and glanced about her as though expecting it to be full of ghosts.
She wondered how many of these golden-haired women had loved the painted walls upon which her eyes now rested. Those wonderful frescoes of Pinturicchio with their background of valley and mountain, and their flower-starred meadows; their animals and birds, their fantastic towers, their dainty figures, fanciful and charming as a fairy tale.
She hoped they had loved them, and praised the painter with their sweetest smiles.
Outside in the garden, the fountain splashed in the sunshine, and suddenly its melody was the melody of her own fountain in her own English garden at home.
She thought of it lovingly, and planned a new hedge of briar-roses in the sunny corner where the dovecote stood.
Gradually the memory of the garden filled her mind, and blotted out the stately visions of palaces and princes.
It grew peopled with well-known figures, with men who twenty years ago had walked with her across its green lawn, had sat with her under its trees, laughing, talking, reading, sometimes, but rarely silent.
Presently she rose, and took from a locked drawer the book she had brought from home, and till this moment, forgotten.
Sitting in the sunshine, with the splash of the fountain sounding in her ears, Anne opened it.