hands.

Then he knew, and he would have straightened himself, but her hands
sprang to meet each other round his neck, and her face was close to
his. But the vision of his own sinful mother rose in her eyes to meet
him.

She held him fast, and three times she kissed him before she would let
him go.




CHAPTER VIII


Gilbert had reached Paris in the train of Duke Geoffrey in September;
the Christmas bells were ringing when he first caught sight of the
walls and towers of Rome. As he drew rein on the crest of a low hill,
the desolate brown waste of the Campagna stretched behind him mile upon
mile to northward, toward the impenetrable forests of Viterbo, and Rome
was at last before him. Before him rose the huge half-ruined walls of
Aurelian, battered by Goth and Saracen and imperial Greek; before him
towered the fortress of Hadrian's tomb, vast, impregnable, ferocious.
Here and there above the broken crenellation of the city's battlements
rose dark and slender towers, square and round, marking the places
where strong robbers had fortified themselves within the city. But from
the point where Gilbert halted, Rome seemed but a long brown ruin, with
portions standing whole, as brown as the rest under the bright depths
of vaulted blue, unflecked by the least fleece of cloud, in the