'It is very sweet of you to think of me.'

She drew the girl to her, enclosed the hand she had taken in both hers,
pressed it and released it. Lucy went quietly out of the room.

Then till dinner she sat reading her New Testament, and trying rather
piteously to remind herself that it was Sunday. Far away in a New England
village, the bells were ringing for the evening meeting. Lucy, shutting
her eyes, could smell the spring scents in the church lane, could hear
the droning of the opening hymn. A vague mystical peace stole upon her,
as she recalled the service; the great words of 'sin,' 'salvation,'
'righteousness,' as the Evangelical understands them, thrilled through her
heart.

Then, as she rose to dress, there burst upon her through the open window
the sunset blaze of the Campagna with the purple dome in its midst. And
with that came the memory of the afternoon,--of the Cardinal--and Manisty.

Very often, in these first days, it was as though her mind ached, under
the stress of new thinking, like something stretched and sore. In the New
England house where she had grown up, a corner of the old-fashioned study
was given up to the books of her grandfather, the divinity professor. They
were a small collection, all gathered with one object,--the confuting and
confronting of Rome. Like many another Protestant zealot, the old professor
had brooded on the crimes and cruelties of persecuting Rome, till they
became a madness in the blood. How well Lucy remembered his books--with
their backs of faded grey or brown cloths, and their grim titles. Most of
them she had never yet been allowed to read. When she looked for a book,
she was wont to pass this shelf by in a vague horror. What Rome habitually
did or permitted, what at any rate she had habitually done or permitted in