noise he was making, broke into a vivacious narrative, of which Jasmine did not understand a single word until he stopped before the door of the cloak-room and was able to enunciate this last sentence without the accompaniment of unoiled wheels:

"...and which, of course, made it very uncomfortable for her through her being related to them."

At the moment the difficulty of persuading a surly cloak-room clerk, even more indignant than the porter at being made to work on Sunday afternoon, that the two crates were lawful luggage for passengers, prevented Jasmine's attempting to trace the origin of the porter's last remark; but when she was blinking in the sunlight outside the station preparatory to her promenade of the walls of York, it recurred to her, and its appropriateness to her own situation made her regret that she had not heard more about Her and Them. Was not she herself feeling so uncomfortable on account of her relationship to Them, so miserable rather that if another obstacle arose in her path she would turn back and ... yes, wicked though the thought undoubtedly was, and imperil though it might her soul should she die before it was absolved ... yes, indeed she really would turn back and drown herself in that puzzo nero they called the English Channel. Here she was searching for a wall in a city that looked as large as Naples. Well, if she did not find it, she would accept her failure as an omen that fate desired her withdrawal from life. But no sooner had Jasmine walked a short way from the station than she found that the wall was ubiquitous, and that she would apparently be unable to proceed anywhere in York without walking on it; so she turned aside down a narrow passage, climbed a short flight of steps, and without thinking any more of suicide she achieved that prospect of the city which had been so highly recommended by the porter.

It was the midday Sabbath hour, when the bells at last were silent; and since it was fine August weather, the sky had achieved a watery and pious blue like a nun's eyes. Before her and behind her the river of the wall flowed through a champaign of roofs from which towers and spires rose like trees; but more interesting to Jasmine's lonely mood were the small back gardens immediately below the parapet on either side, from which the faintly acrid perfume of late summer flowers came up mingled with beefy smells from the various windows of the small houses beyond, where the shadowy inmates were eating their Sunday dinners. She felt that if this were Italy a friendly hand would be beckoning to her from one of those windows an invitation to join the party, and it was with another grudge against England that she sat down alone on a municipal bench to eat from a triangular cardboard box six triangular ham sandwiches. The restless alchemy of nature had set to work to change the essences of the container and the contents, so that the sandwiches tasted more like cardboard and the cardboard felt more like sandwiches; no doubt it would even have tasted more like sandwiches if Jasmine had eaten the box, which she might easily have done, for her taste had been blunted by the long journey, and she would have chewed ambrosia as mechanically had ambrosia been offered to her. The sandwiches finished, she ate half a dozen plums, the stones of which dropped on the path and joined the stones of other plums eaten by other people on the same bench that morning. Jasmine's mind went swooping back over the journey, past the bright azure lakes of Savoy, past the stiff and splendid carabinieri at the frontier, pausing for a moment to play hide-and-seek with olives and sea through the tunnels of the riviera di levante ... and then swooped down, down more swiftly until it reached the island of Sirene, from which it had been torn not yet four full days ago; the while Jasmine's foot was arranging the plum stones and a few loose pebbles into first an S and then an I and then a decrepit R, until they exhausted themselves over an absurdly elongated E.

The weathercock of the nearest church steeple found enough wind on this hot afternoon to indicate waveringly that what wind there was blew from the South. Some lines of Christina Rossetti often quoted by her father expressed, as only remembered poetry and remembered scents can, the inexpressible:

She evoked the last occasion at which she had heard her father murmur these lines. They had been dining on the terrace until the last rays of a crimson sunset had faded into a deep starry dusk. Mr. Cazenove had been dining with them, and from the street below a mandolin had decorated with some simple tune memories of bygone years. The two old friends had talked of the lovely peasant girls that haunted the Sirene of their youth, a Sirene not yet spoiled by tourists; an island that in such reminiscence became fabulous like the island of Prospero.

"But the loveliest of them all was Gelsomina," Mr. Cazenove had declared. Jasmine was thrilled when she could listen to such tales about her mother's beauty, that mother who lived for herself only as a figure in one of her father's landscapes, whose image for herself was merged in a bunch of red roses, so that even to this day, by dwelling on that elusive recollection of childhood, the touch of a red rose was the touch of a human cheek, and she could never see one without a thought of kisses.

"Yes, indeed she was! The loveliest of them all," Mr. Cazenove had repeated.

Her father had responded with these lines of Christina Rossetti, and she knew that he was thinking of a fatal journey to England, when the unparagoned Gelsomina had caught cold and died in Paris of pneumonia on the way North to attend the death of Grandfather Grant.

And now her father was dead too.

In a flood of woeful recollections the incidents of that fatal day last month overwhelmed her. She felt her heart quicken again with terror; she saw again the countenance of the fisherman who came with Mr. Cazenove to tell her that a squall had capsized the little cutter in the Bay of Salerno, and that the only one drowned was her father. Everybody in Sirene had been sympathetic, and everybody had bewailed her being alone in the world until letters had arrived from uncles and aunts in England to assure her that she should be looked after by them; and then nearly everybody had insisted that she must leave the island as soon as possible and take advantage of their offers. Yet here she was, more utterly alone than ever in this remote city of the North, with only a few letters from people whom she had never seen and for whom she felt that she should never have the least affection. She was penitent as soon as this confession had been wrung from her soul, and penitently she felt in her bag for the letters from the various relatives who had written to assure her that she was not as much alone in the world as this Sunday in York was making her believe.

Among these envelopes there was one that by its size and stiffness and sharp edges always insisted on being read first. There was a crest on the flap and a crest above the address on the blue notepaper.