They clambered down the terraced ravines sometimes, a day or two later, to arid banks by a dry torrent’s bed where Italian primroses really grew, interspersed with tall grape-hyacinths, and scented violets, and glossy cleft leaves of winter aconite.  But even the primroses were not the same thing to Herminia as those she used to gather on the dewy slopes of the Redlands; they were so dry and dust-grimed, and the path by the torrent’s side was so distasteful and unsavory.  Bare white boughs of twisted fig-trees depressed her.  Besides, these hills were steep, and Herminia felt the climbing.  Nothing in city or suburbs attracted her soul.  Etruscan Volumnii, each lolling in white travertine on the sculptured lid of his own sarcophagus urn, and all duly ranged in the twilight of their tomb at their spectral banquet, stirred her heart but feebly.  St. Francis, Santa Chiara, fell flat on her English fancy.  But as for Alan, he revelled all day long in his native element.  He sketched every morning, among the huddled, strangled lanes; sketched churches and monasteries, and portals of palazzi; sketched mountains clear-cut in that pellucid air; till Herminia wondered how he could sit so long in the broiling sun or keen wind on those bare hillsides, or on broken brick parapets in those noisome byways.  But your born sketcher is oblivious of all on earth save his chosen art; and Alan was essentially a painter in fibre, diverted by pure circumstance into a Chancery practice.

The very pictures in the gallery failed to interest Herminia, she knew not why.  Alan couldn’t rouse her to enthusiasm over his beloved Buonfigli.  Those naive flaxen-haired angels, with sweetly parted lips, and baskets of red roses in their delicate hands, own sisters though they were to the girlish Lippis she had so admired at Florence, moved her heart but faintly.  Try as she might to like them, she responded to nothing Perugian in any way.

At the end of a week or two, however, Alan began to complain of constant headache.  He was looking very well, but grew uneasy and restless.  Herminia advised him to give up sketching for a while, those small streets were so close; and he promised to yield to her wishes in the matter.  Yet he grew worse next day, so that Herminia, much alarmed, called in an Italian doctor.  Perugia boasted no English one.  The Italian felt his pulse, and listened to his symptoms.  “The signore came here from Florence?” he asked.

“From Florence,” Herminia assented, with a sudden sinking.

The doctor protruded his lower lip.  “This is typhoid fever,” he said after a pause.  “A very bad type.  It has been assuming such a form this winter at Florence.”

He spoke the plain truth.  Twenty-one days before in his bedroom at the hotel in Florence, Alan had drunk a single glass of water from the polluted springs that supply in part the Tuscan metropolis.  For twenty-one days those victorious microbes had brooded in silence in his poisoned arteries.  At the end of that time, they swarmed and declared themselves.  He was ill with an aggravated form of the most deadly disease that still stalks unchecked through unsanitated Europe.