It was very exciting to be out alone against Mario’s orders, and the excitement added a glowing quality to the beauty the girl saw on either hand. The walled lane ran between poderi of ploughed land, and over the walls the olive trees stretched their branches, now thickly strung with harvest-ripe fruit. Here and there the muscular, grey wood had thrust its gnarled elbows through the stone-work, making it bulge dangerously, and in places dislodging it altogether. All the way up the hill on one side a hedge of monthly roses, full two yards high, ran along the wall’s top. It was lusty and lovely – thickly covered still with its shell-like flowers, which showed more fragile than ever because of the hale scarlet and yellow hips which were maturing on the same stems at the new buds. And between the gaps of the hedge, and above it, was the blue, blue sky of the Tramontana.

Joanna, all her blood dancing, climbed as far as a little balustraded platform of stone which curved out to her left where the wall ended, in a graceful semicircle. A stone bench ran round it, and its playful builder had decorated it with pillars bearing fir cones on their capitals.

She knelt on the seat, leaned her elbows on the ledge, and looked down at the world lying in a bath of morning sunshine. Her eyes wandered from Florence to the grey hillsides that glittered when the air moved. She looked at the yellow villas, blind and basking. She remembered one – almost hidden from her among its cypresses – which Mario had pointed out as the home of a woman celebrated for her loves. La Porziuncola, it had been called, and Joanna had a vivid memory of the little sunken door in the wall, where it was said the lover was wont to enter. On one of their rare walks Mario had taken her past it.

But now, as she looked La Porziuncola, the other shuttered villas, the restless, glittering spume of olives on the slopes, the quieter shining of Florence and her Arno, seemed to her but a part of the passing dream which was her marriage:

“It can’t go on,” she thought. “It won’t last. It isn’t real. It is playing at something – pretending, as children pretend when they play.”

The very strength of the December sunshine struck her as incredible, and the hillsides were soulless, surely.

Yet it was no dream. The seat was hard, and its cold struck through to her knees. She really was disobeying Mario in being here. She really had a husband and gaoler, who at this moment was somewhere down there absorbed in his beloved machinery.