"Why, this is but a country-life you have been talking of; very well in
its way for three months in the year."

"Italy, then, for the other nine," returned Godolphin.

"Ah, Percy!--is pleasure, mere pleasure, vulgar pleasure,--to be really
the sole end and aim of life?"

"Assuredly."

"And action, enterprise-are these as nothing?"

Godolphin was silent, but began absently to throw pebbles into the water.
The action reminded Constance of the first time she had ever seen him
among his ancestral groves; and she sighed as she now gazed on a brow from
which the effeminacy and dreaming of his life had banished much of its
early chivalric and earnest expression.

CHAPTER XLVII.

NEWS OF LUCILLA.

Godolphin was about one morning to depart for the convent to which Lucilla
had flown, when a letter was brought to him from the abbess of the convent
herself; it had followed him from Rome. Lucilla had left her
retreat--left it three days before Godolphin's marriage; the abbess knew
not whither, but believed she intended to reside in Rome. She inclosed
him a note from Lucilla, left for him before her departure. Short but
characteristic, it ran thus: