So we have each of us thought--
especially the mothers in Israel among us--about the unborn babe
that hastens along to its birth with such a radiant halo of the
possible future ever gilding and glorifying its unseen forehead.
X.
All happy times must end, and the happier the sooner. At one short
week's close they hurried on to Perugia.
And how full Alan had been of Perugia beforehand! He loved every
stone of the town, every shadow of the hillsides, he told Herminia
at Florence; and Herminia started on her way accordingly well
prepared to fall quite as madly in love with the Umbrian capital as
Alan himself had done.
The railway journey, indeed, seemed extremely pretty. What a march
of sweet pictures! They mounted with creaking wheels the slow
ascent up the picturesque glen where the Arno runs deep, to the
white towers of Arezzo; then Cortona throned in state on its lonely
hill-top, and girt by its gigantic Etruscan walls; next the low
bank, the lucid green water, the olive-clad slopes of reedy
Thrasymene; last of all, the sere hills and city-capped heights of
their goal, Perugia.
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