jointly indignant to find it shut against the public in preparation for
the imperialities and royalties coming to occupy it. They were in time
for the noon guard-mounting, however, and Mrs. March said that the way
the retiring squad kicked their legs out in the high martial step of the
German soldiers was a perfect expression of the insolent militarism of
their empire, and was of itself enough to make one thank Heaven that one
was an American and a republican. She softened a little toward their
system when it proved that the garden of the palace was still open, and
yet more when she sank down upon a bench between two marble groups
representing the Rape of Proserpine and the Rape of Europa. They stood
each in a gravelled plot, thickly overrun by a growth of ivy, and the
vine climbed the white naked limbs of the nymphs, who were present on a
pretence of gathering flowers, but really to pose at the spectators, and
clad them to the waist and shoulders with an effect of modesty never
meant by the sculptor, but not displeasing. There was an old fountain
near, its stone rim and centre of rock-work green with immemorial mould,
and its basin quivering between its water-plants under the soft fall of
spray. At a waft of fitful breeze some leaves of early autumn fell from
the trees overhead upon the elderly pair where they sat, and a little
company of sparrows came and hopped about their feet. Though the square
without was so all astir with festive expectation, there were few people
in the garden; three or four peasant women in densely fluted white skirts
and red aprons and shawls wandered by and stared at the Europa and at the
Proserpine.

It was a precious moment in which the charm of the city's past seemed to
culminate, and they were loath to break it by speech.

"Why didn't we have something like all this on our first wedding
journey?" she sighed at last. "To think of our battening from Boston to