Another, a year or two older, walked beside, the fingers of one hand within her girdle.

She paused for a moment with a greeting for Cornelius.
That visionary scene was the close, the fitting close, of the afternoon's strange experiences.

A few minutes later, passing forward on his way along the public road, he could have fancied it a dream.
The house of Cecilia grouped itself beside that other curious house he had lately visited at Tusculum.

And what a contrast was presented by the former, in its suggestions of hopeful industry, of immaculate cleanness, of responsive affection!--all alike determined by that transporting discovery of some fact, or series [106] of facts, in which the old puzzle of life had found its solution.

In truth, one of his most characteristic and constant traits had ever been a certain longing for escape--for some sudden, relieving interchange, across the very spaces of life, it might be, along which he had lingered most pleasantly--for a lifting, from time to time, of the actual horizon.
It was like the necessity under which the painter finds himself, to set a window or open doorway in the background of his picture; or like a sick man's longing for northern coolness, and the whispering willow-trees, amid the breathless evergreen forests of the south.