Next morning a shadow fell upon their happiness--the Storys' little boy was seized with convulsions; in the evening he was dead.[57] A second child--a girl--was taken ill in the Brownings' house, and could not be moved from where she lay in a room below their apartment.

Mrs Browning was in a panic for her own boy, though his apple-red cheeks spoke of health.

Rome, for a time, was darkened with grief and anxiety; nor did the city itself impress her as she had expected: "It's a palimpsest Rome," she writes, "a watering-place written over the antique." The chief gains of these Roman months were those of friendship and pleasant acquaintances added to those already given by Italy.

In rooms under those occupied by the Brownings was Page the American artist, who painted in colours then regarded as "Venetian," now almost darkened out of existence, as a gift for Mrs Browning, the portrait of Robert Browning exhibited in the Royal Academy of 1856.

Browning himself wrote to Story with enthusiasm of Page's work.