[Illustration: RUINS OF FORUM, ROME.]


Mr. Sumner and Mrs. Douglas had been most fortunate in getting
possession of extremely pleasant apartments close to the Pincio. These
were in the very same house in which they had lived with their parents
twenty years before, when Mrs. Douglas was a young girl of eighteen
years. Here she had first met and learned to love young Kenneth Douglas,
so that most tender memories clustered about the place, and she was glad
that her children should learn to know it.

She soon began to pick up the old threads of life. "Ah me! what golden
threads they then were," she often sighed. Mr. Sumner was at home here
in Rome almost as much as in Florence, and was busy for a time making
and receiving calls from artist friends.

Malcom had his own private guide, and from morning until night they
hardly saw him. He averred himself to be in the seventh heaven, and
there was little need that he should proclaim the fact; it was evident
enough. Julius Cæsar's Commentaries, Cicero's Orations, Virgil, all
Roman history were getting illuminated for him in such a way that they
would never grow dim.

But at first the others felt sensibly the change from dear, familiar
little Florence. Rome is so vast in her history, legend, and romance!
The city was oppressive at near sight.

"Shall we ever really know anything about it all?" asked the girls of
each other. Even Miss Sherman, who had been able to get a room in a