We
stopped at Siena, Cortona, Orvieto, Perugia and many other cities, and
then after a fortnight passed between Rome and Naples went to the
Venetian provinces and visited all those wondrous towns that lie between
the southern slopes of the Alps and the northern ones of the Apennines,
coming back at last by the S. Gothard. I doubt whether he had enjoyed
the trip more than I did myself, but it was not till we were on the point
of returning that Ernest had recovered strength enough to be called
fairly well, and it was not for many months that he so completely lost
all sense of the wounds which the last four years had inflicted on him as
to feel as though there were a scar and a scar only remaining.
They say that when people have lost an arm or a foot they feel pains in
it now and again for a long while after they have lost it. One pain
which he had almost forgotten came upon him on his return to England, I
mean the sting of his having been imprisoned. As long as he was only a
small shop-keeper his imprisonment mattered nothing; nobody knew of it,
and if they had known they would not have cared; now, however, though he
was returning to his old position he was returning to it disgraced, and
the pain from which he had been saved in the first instance by
surroundings so new that he had hardly recognised his own identity in the
middle of them, came on him as from a wound inflicted yesterday.
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