brimming with grain, she lured a flight of metallic wings across to the far edge of the square, watching the soft and eager heads as three or four birds perched on her arms or sought the spilt gold on the pavement. It was a sad day when she turned from this, from the sunshine and the water to the coldness of the North.

It was not until the following year she became really intimate with Italy, coming to Rome, to the Forum, where she gathered an antique bit of marble, to Naples crowded with the open life she loved, the aquarium where whole hours were spent watching the sleepy sea-anemones, sea horses, crested as a wave, the feeding of the octopus, and the strange southern iridescent fish darting and shifting in the bubbling water. From this, from days at Capri or at Baia, some weeks at Florence, with enforced confinement to the museum, came near to being an irksome end to her second winter spent abroad.

CHAPTER II

HISTORY

"I HATE Michel Angelo." The custodian looked shocked, a passing visitor smiled. Nancy stared at the head of the faun with more than a little fear she would surrender to some compelling power in the rough marble, gazing up at her with such inscrutable eyes, but she was tired of Michel Angelo, the name followed them everywhere, besides nobody could explain to her what a faun was. Outside in the sunshine there was a puppy playing, a brown puppy chasing its tail, and though she was aware it must long ago have strayed into one of the dark Florentine streets, an unconquerable hope that it lingered on the steps prompted her to be impatient of each delay. A live puppy held a vastly greater interest for her than a cold statue. "I hate him," she repeated, looking for sympathy to her mother who had delivered her from the tyranny

of museums on more than one memorable occasion.

We shall only be another half-hour now, and if you are good you shall have a new book this afternoon.'

Contented with the promise, Nancy was silent. A book was far more exciting than a puppy she could not touch.

Museums were cold places, there could be no playing in them. There were statues, many of them broken, all with long uncomprehended names. The shelves were lined with pottery, red or black, and curiously fashioned green bronze lustred with age. Always in answer to her persistent inquiries she was told they were vases" or "lamps." Even to herself she lacked power to put into words her desire, impetuous to escape into speech, to know who had used these vessels, when and where the shields, the breastplates hanging on the wall, had been worn. What did they eat, what did they wear, how did they live? Childhood is not articulate, so she thought instead of the brown puppy playing in the sunshine, the soft flickering movement of a donkey's ears. To her eyes these carvings were relics of a dead, uninteresting world, yet there existed an imperious sensation of a domain passed, as one

might pass a garden, ignorant that behind the stone hedges bees swarmed in velvet murmur amid hives, whence the blood of the sun trickled in stalactites of honey and stung the delicate powder silvering the bloom of the violet grapes. Chance put into her hands a key.

Among the two or three English books a child might care to have, Nancy chose that afternoon one, by no noted name, that retold to infancy such portion of the Iliad as could be understood by it, with the addition of many earlier and later stories, the fall of Troy, the Amazons, myths of the Greek Gods. She was attracted by the picture on the cover, struggling men in armour resembling that abounding in Italian museums, and carried the book triumphantly away.

Ever a quick reader, picture after picture shaped in her mind, never to fade; interest quickened till it flamed, ardent, invincible. Lovelier than the opening petals of the almond, richer than a southern morning, impressions poured into the white and rounded vase of her imagination, clamorous and hot with sweetIt was her first revelation of the power of literature, of her own power and desire of a richness that could never be satisfied, a new world, or an older one understood at last. She

ness.

read of Greek children, of their games, their days passed in enviable wildness; of the strengthening of young Achilles on the hearts of lions, the marrow of bears; of fauns and satyrs, music and the Nereids of the sea. Troy pictured itself to her, the ships, the tents on the shore, full of the little details children love, the woollen cloths, the carven bowls, the unyoked horses. She delighted in the combats, the funeral games, especially the wrestling and the chariot race, the burning of the ships, and, supreme moment, the fight over the body of Patroklos. She could see it, feel it, till her days passed in a crashing of bronze, a clatter of sandals, till to have seen the sun-browned body of a warrior catch the light at the corner beneath the heavy perfection of his harness would have surprised her less than the group of guide-equipped tourists plaintively wondering what they ought to admire.

Parts there were that appealed to her less strongly than others, the loveliness of Helen, for instance, boys and warriors alone reigning in her fancy, and Paris, whom she heartily despised, but it was the foundation of a knowledge of antiquity never again to be ignored. Marred but by a need of constant reassurance, it was more or less a truthful picture of a distant