The Passport

THE PASSPORT

BY

RICHARD BAGOT

NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
MCMV

Copyright, 1905, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

All rights Reserved.

Published September, 1905.

THE PASSPORT

I

The fierce heat of the mid-day hours was waning, and the leaves stirred in the first faint breath of the evening breeze stealing over the Roman Campagna from the sea that lay like a golden streak along the western horizon. It was the month of the sollione--of the midsummer sun "rejoicing as a giant to run his course." From twelve o'clock till four the little town of Montefiano, nestling among the lower spurs of the Sabine Hills, had been as a place from which all life had fled. Not a human creature had been visible in the steep, tufa-paved street leading up to the square palace that looked grimly down on the little township clustering beneath it--not even a dog; only some chickens dusting themselves, and a strayed pig.

The cicale, hidden among the branches of a group of venerable Spanish chestnuts on the piazza in front of the church, had never ceased their monotonous rattle; otherwise silence had reigned at Montefiano since the church bells had rung out mezzogiorno—that silence which falls on all nature in Italy during the hours when the sollione blazes in the heavens and breeds life on the earth.

But now, with the first coming of the evening breeze, casements were thrown open, green shutters which had been hermetically closed since morning were flung back and Montefiano awoke for the second time in the twenty-four hours.

A side door of the church opened, and Don Agostino, the parish priest, emerged from it, carrying his breviary in one hand and an umbrella tucked under the other arm. Crossing the little square hurriedly, for the western sun still beat fiercely upon the flag-stones, he sought the shade of the chestnut-trees, under which he began pacing slowly backwards and forwards, saying his office the while.

A tall, handsome man, Don Agostino was scarcely the type of priest usually to be met with in hill villages such as Montefiano. His black silk soutane was scrupulously clean and tidy; and its button-holes stitched with red, as well as the little patch of violet silk at his throat, proclaimed him to be a monsignore. Nobody at Montefiano called him so, however. To his parishioners he was simply Don Agostino; and, in a district in which priests were none too well looked upon, there was not a man, woman, or child who had not a good word to say for him.

This was the more remarkable inasmuch as Don Agostino was evidently of a very different social grade from even the most well-to-do among his flock. At first sight, a stranger would have thought that there could not be much in common between him and the peasants and farmers who stood in a little crowd at the doors of his church on a festa while he said mass, and still less with the women and children who knelt within the building. There was, however, the most important thing of all in common between them, and that was sympathy—human sympathy—so simple a thing, and yet so rare.

This, again, was remarkable; for no one could glance at Don Agostino's countenance without at once realizing that it belonged to a man who was probably intellectual and certainly refined. It would not be imagined, for instance, that there could be any fellow-feeling between him and the woman a few yards down the street who, indifferent as to the scantiness of the garments by way of clothing a well-developed bust, was leaning out of a window screaming objurgations at a small boy for chasing the strayed pig. Nevertheless, Don Agostino would doubtless have entered into the feelings of both the woman and the boy—and, probably, also into those of the pig—had he noticed the uproar, which, his thoughts being concentrated for the moment on the saying of his office, he did not do.

He had been at Montefiano some years now, and the stories current at the time of his arrival in the place as to the reason why he had been sent there from Rome were wellnigh forgotten by his parishioners. At first they held aloof from him suspiciously, as from one who was not of their condition in life, and who had only been sent to Montefiano because—well, because of some indiscretion committed at Rome. Some said it was politics, others that it was women, and others, again, that it was neither the one nor the other. All agreed that an instruito like Don Agostino, with his air of a gran signore, and money behind that air, too, was not sent to a place like Montefiano for nothing.

Don Agostino, however, had not troubled himself as to what was said or thought, but had taken up his duties with that unquestioning obedience which spiritual Rome has incorporated with the rest of her heritage from the Cæsars. He neither offered any explanations nor made any complaints concerning the surroundings to which he found himself relegated. For two or three years after his first coming to Montefiano strangers had sometimes visited him, and once or twice a cardinal had come from Rome to see him—but that was ten years ago and more, and now nobody came. Probably, the Montefianesi said, the Vatican had forgotten him; and they added, with a shrug of the shoulders, that it was better for a priest to be forgotten in Montefiano than remembered in a cup of chocolate in Rome.

As to any little affair of morals—well, it was certain that twenty, nay, even fifteen, years ago Don Agostino must have been a very good-looking young man, priest or no priest; and shoulders were shrugged again.

Whatever had been the cause of it, morals or politics, Monsignor Agostino was parroco of Montefiano, a Sabine village forty miles from Rome, with a population of some three thousand souls—a gray mass of houses clustering on a hill-side, crowned by the feudal fortress of its owners who had not slept a night within its walls since Don Agostino had taken over the spiritual interests of their people.

To be sure, Montefiano was a commune, and petty officialism was as rampant within its bounds as in many a more important place. But the princes of Montefiano were lords of the soil, and lords also of its tillers, as they were of other possessions in the Agro Romano. There had been a time, not so very many years ago, when a prince of Montefiano could post from Rome to Naples, passing each night on one of the family properties; but building-contractors, cards, and cocottes had combined to reduce the acreage in the late prince's lifetime, and Montefiano was now one of the last of the estates left to his only child, a girl of barely eighteen summers.

The Montefiano family had been singularly unlucky in its last two generations. The three younger brothers of the late prince had died—two of them when mere lads, and the third as a married but childless man. The prince himself had married early in life the beautiful daughter of a well-known Venetian house, who had brought a considerable dowry with her, and whom he had deceived and neglected from the first week of his marriage with her until her death, which had occurred when the one child born of the union was but a few months old.

Then, after some years, the prince had married again. He had taken to religion in later life, when health had suddenly failed him.

His second wife was a Belgian by birth, and had gained a considerable reputation for holiness in "black" circles in Rome. Indeed, it was generally supposed that it was a mere question of time before Mademoiselle d'Antin should take the veil. Other questions, however, apparently presented themselves for her consideration, and she took the Principe di Montefiano instead. It appeared that, after all, this, and not the cloister, was her true vocation; for she piloted the broken-down roué skilfully, and at the same time rapidly to the entrance, at all events, to purgatory, where she left the helm in order to enjoy her widow's portion, and to undertake the guardianship of her youthful step-daughter Donna Bianca Acorari, now princess of Montefiano in her own right.

Some people in Rome said that the deceased Montefiano was bored and prayed to death by his pious wife and the priests with whom she surrounded him. These, however, were chiefly the boon companions of the prince's unregenerate days, whose constitutions were presumably stronger than his had proved itself to be.

Rome—respectable Rome—was edified at the ending that the Prince of Montefiano had made, at the piety of his widow, and also at the fact that there was more money in the Montefiano coffers than anybody had suspected could be the case.

The portion left to the widowed princess was, if not large, at least considerably larger than had been anticipated even by those who believed that they knew the state of her husband's affairs better than their neighbors; and by the time Donna Bianca should be of an age to marry, her fortune would, or should, be worth the attention of any husband, let alone the fiefs and titles she would bring into that husband's family.

The Princess of Montefiano, since her widowhood, had continued to live quietly on the first floor of the gloomy old palace behind the Piazza Campitelli, in Rome, which had belonged to the family from the sixteenth century. The months of August, September, and October she and her step-daughter usually spent at a villa near Velletri, but except for this brief period Rome was their only habitation. The princess went little into the world, even into that of the "black" society, and it was generally understood that she occupied herself with good works. Indeed, those who professed to know her intimately declared that had it not been for the sense of her duty towards her husband's little girl, she would have long ago retired into a convent, and would certainly do so when Donna Bianca married.

In the mean time, the great, square building, with its Renaissance façade which dominated the little town of Montefiano, remained unvisited by its possessors, and occupied only by the agent and his family, who lived in a vast apartment on the ground-floor of the palace. The agent collected the rents and forwarded them to the princess's man of business in Rome, and to the good people of Montefiano the saints and the angels were personalities far more realizable than were the owners of the soil on which they labored.

Not that Don Agostino knew the princess any better than did his parishioners. He always insisted that he had never seen her. His attitude, indeed, had been a perpetual cause of surprise to the agent, who, when Don Agostino first came to the place, had not unreasonably supposed that whenever the priest went to Rome, which he did at long intervals, becoming ever longer as time went on, one of his first objects would be to present himself at the Palazzo Acorari.

Apparently, however, Don Agostino did not deem it necessary to know the princess or Donna Bianca personally. Possibly he considered that so long as his formal letters to the princess on behalf of his flock in times of distress or sickness met with a satisfactory response, there was no reason to obtrude himself individually on their notice. This, at least, was the conclusion that the agent and the official classes of Montefiano arrived at. As to the humbler members of Don Agostino's flock, they did not trouble themselves to draw any conclusions except the most satisfactory one involved in the knowledge that, as the Madonna and the saints stood between them and Domeneddio without their being personally acquainted with him, so Don Agostino stood between them and the excellencies in Rome, who, of course, could not spare the time to visit so distant a place as Montefiano.

II

Don Agostino, his office completed, closed his breviary and stood gazing across the plain below to where Rome lay. On a clear day, and almost always in the early mornings in summer, the cupola of St. Peter's could be seen from Montefiano, hung, as it were, midway between earth and heaven; but now only a low-lying curtain of haze marked the position of the city. Down in the valley, winding between low cliffs clothed with brushwood and stunted oaks, the waters of the Tiber flashed in the slanting sun-rays, and the bold outline of Soracte rose in the blue distance, like an island floating upon a summer sea.

And Don Agostino stood and gazed, and as he did so he thought of the restless life forever seething in the far-off city he knew so well—the busy brains that were working, calculating, intriguing in the shadow of that mighty dome which bore the emblem of self-sacrifice and humility on its summit, and of all the good and all the evil that was being wrought beneath that purple patch of mist that hid—Rome.

None knew the good and the evil better than he, and the mysterious way in which the one sprang from the other in a never-ending circle, as it had sprung now for wellnigh twenty centuries—ever since the old gods began to wear halos and to be called saints.

Don Agostino, or, to give him his proper name and ecclesiastical rank, Monsignor Lelli, had been a canon of the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, in Rome, before he fell into disgrace at the Vatican.

Notwithstanding the gossip which had been rife concerning the reasons for his exile from Rome to Montefiano, private morals had had nothing to do with the matter. For several years he had filled a post of some confidence at the Vatican—a post, like that held by Judas Iscariot, involving considerable financial responsibility.

Judas Iscariot, however, had been more fortunate than Monsignor Lelli, inasmuch as he was attached to the financial service of Christ, and not to that of Christ's vicar.

To make a long story short, certain loans, advanced for political purposes, though private social interests were not extraneous to the transactions, lightened the money-bags to an unforeseen extent, and the securities which Monsignor Lelli held in their stead soon proved to be little better than waste paper. It was known that Monsignor Lelli had acted under protest, and, moreover, that he had obeyed instructions which he had no choice but to obey.

The Vatican, however, differs in no way from any other organization to carry on which the rules of discipline must be strictly maintained; and when a superior officer blunders, a subordinate must, if possible, be found to bear the blame. In this case Monsignor Lelli was manifestly the fit and proper scape-goat; and here all comparison with Judas Iscariot ended, for he had walked off with his burden to Montefiano without uttering so much as a protesting bleat.

But at Rome the true motives for actions both public and private are rarely to be discovered on the surface. Nominally, Monsignor Lelli's disgrace was the direct consequence of his negligence in safeguarding the sums of money for the sound investment of which he was supposed to be responsible. Practically, its cause lay elsewhere. He was known to be a Liberal in his political views, the friend of a prominent foreign cardinal resident in Rome, to whose influence, indeed, he owed his canonry of Santa Maria Maggiore, and whose attitude towards the Italian government, and also towards various dogmatic questions, had for some time aroused the ill-will of a pontiff who was even more anti-Italian than his predecessor. Unfortunately for himself, Monsignor Lelli had published his views on the relations between Church and State, and had drawn down upon his head the wrath of the clerical party in consequence. His enemies, and they were many, left no means untried to bring about his disgrace, fully aware that by doing so they would at the same time be striking a blow at the obnoxious cardinal who supported not only Monsignor Lelli but also every Liberal ecclesiastic in Rome. When it became evident that more than one grave financial blunder had been committed by others in authority, it was equally obvious that the moment to strike this blow had arrived, and it was delivered accordingly.

All these things, however, had happened years ago. The cardinal was dead—of one of those mysteriously rapid illnesses which he made no secret to his more intimate friends as being likely some day to overtake him—and Monsignor Lelli remained at Montefiano, forgotten, as his parishioners declared, though he himself knew well that at Rome nothing is forgotten, and that so long as his enemies lived, so long would he, Monsignor Lelli, be required to devote his learning and his intellect to the needs of a peasant population. Afterwards—well, it was of the afterwards he was thinking, as he gazed dreamily over the great plain stretching away to Rome, when the sound of horses' hoofs in the street below attracted his attention, and, looking round, he saw the agent, Giuseppe Fontana—Sor Beppe, as he was commonly called in Montefiano—riding towards him apparently in some haste.

Don Agostino moved out of the shade to meet him.

"Signor Fattore, good-evening!" he said, courteously, knowing that the man liked to be given his full official title as administrator of the Montefiano fief.

Sor Beppe rode up alongside of him, raising his felt hat as he returned the salutation. He wore his official coat of dark-blue cloth, on the silver buttons of which were engraved the arms and coronet of the Montefiano. He was a powerfully made man with a dark, grizzled beard, inclining to gray, and he sat his horse—a well-built black stallion—as one who was more often in the saddle than out of it. On ordinary days he would carry a double-barrelled gun slung across his shoulders, but to-day the weapon was absent.

Don Agostino noted the fact, and also that the agent's face was lighted up with unusual excitement.

"And what is there new, Signor Fontana?" he asked, briefly.

"Perbacco! What is there new?" repeated Fontana. "There is a whole world of new—but your reverence will never guess what it is! Such a thing has not happened for fifteen years—"

"But what is it?" insisted Don Agostino, tranquilly. "I quite believe that nothing new has happened in Montefiano for fifteen years. I have been here nearly ten, and—"

"I have ridden down to tell you. The letter came only an hour ago. Her excellency the princess—their excellencies the princesses, I should say—"

"Well," interrupted Don Agostino, "what about them?"

The agent took a letter from his pocket and spread it out on the pommel of his saddle. Then he handed it to Don Agostino.

"There!" he exclaimed. "It is her excellency herself who writes. They are coming here—to the palace—to stay for weeks—months, perhaps."

Don Agostino uttered a sudden ejaculation. It was difficult to say whether it was of surprise or dismay.

"Here!" he said—"to Montefiano? But the place is dismantled—a barrack!"

"And do I not know it—I?" returned Sor Beppe. "There are some tables and some chairs—and there are things that once were beds; but there is nothing else, unless it is some pictures on the walls—and the prince—blessed soul—took the best of those to Rome years ago."

Don Agostino read the letter attentively.

"The princess says that all the necessary furniture will be sent from Rome at once," he observed, "and servants—everything, in fact. The rooms on the piano nobile are to be made ready—and the chapel. Well, Signor Fontana," he continued, "you will have plenty to occupy your time if, as the princess says, everything is to be ready in a fortnight from to-day. After all, the palace was built to be lived in—is it not true?"

"Very true, reverence; but it is so sudden. After so many years, to want everything done in fifteen days—"

"Women, my dear Signor Fontana—women!" said Don Agostino, deprecatingly.

The agent laughed. "That is what I said to my wife," he replied.

"It was not a wise thing to say," observed Don Agostino.

"It is an incredible affair," resumed the other, brushing a fly from his horse's flank as he spoke; "and no reception by the people—as little notice as possible to be taken of their excellencies' arrival. You see what the letter says, reverence?"

"Yes," replied Don Agostino, meditatively. "It is unusual, certainly, under the circumstances."

"But," he added, "the princess has undoubtedly some good reason for wishing to arrive at Montefiano in as quiet a manner as possible. Perhaps she is ill, or her daughter is ill—who knows?"

"They say she is a saint," observed Fontana.

Don Agostino looked at him; the tone of Sor Beppe's voice implied that such a fact would account for any eccentricity. Then he smiled.

"She is at all events the mistress of Montefiano, until the young princess is of age or marries," he remarked; "so, Signor Fontana, there is nothing more to be said or done."

"Except to obey her excellency's instructions."

"Exactly—except to obey her instructions," repeated Don Agostino.

"It is strange that your reverence, the parroco of Montefiano, should never have seen our padrona."

"It is still stranger that you—her representative here—should never have seen her," returned Don Agostino.

"That is true," said the agent; "but"—and his white teeth gleamed in his beard as he smiled—"saints do not often show themselves, reverendo! My respects," he added, lifting his hat and gathering up his reins. "I have to ride down to Poggio to arrange with the station-master there for the arrival of the things which will be sent from Rome." And settling himself in his saddle, Sor Beppe started off at an easy canter and soon disappeared round a turn of the white road, leaving a cloud of dust behind him.

Don Agostino looked after him for a moment or two, and then returned thoughtfully to his house.

The intelligence the agent had brought him was news, indeed, and he wondered what its true purport might be. It was certainly strange that, after studiously avoiding Montefiano for all these years, the princess should suddenly take it into her head to come there for a prolonged stay. Hitherto, Don Agostino had been very happy in his exile, chiefly because that exile was so complete. There had been nobody at Montefiano to rake up the past, to open old wounds which the passing of years had cicatrized, and which only throbbed now and again when memory insisted upon asserting her rights.

The petty jealousies and malignities which poison the atmosphere of most courts, and which in that of the Vatican are the more poisonous inasmuch as they wear a religious mask, could not penetrate to Montefiano, or, if they did, could not long survive out of the air of Rome. Monsignor Lelli had quickly realized this; and, the confidence of his parishioners once gained, he had learned to appreciate the change of air. The financial conditions of the Vatican did not interest Montefiano. Consequently, the story of Don Agostino's financial indiscretions had not reached the little room in the Corso Garibaldi, which was the nightly resort of the more wealthy among the community, and in which high political matters were settled with a rapidity that should have made the parliaments of Europe blush—were any one of them capable of blushing.

As to the other stories—well, Don Agostino had soon lived them down. Montefiano had declared—with some cynicism, perhaps, but with much justice—that there were those who were lucky in their adventures and those who were unlucky, and that priests, when all was said and done, were much the same as other people. Nevertheless, Montefiano had kept its eyes on Don Agostino for a while, in case of accidents—for nobody likes accidents to happen at home.

But it was not entirely of these matters that Don Agostino was thinking as he let himself into the little garden by the side of the church. His house, connected with the sacristy by a pergola over which vines and roses were struggling for the mastery, stood at the end of this garden, and Don Agostino, opening the door quietly lest his housekeeper should hear and descend upon him, passed into his study.

The news Sor Beppe had brought had awakened other memories—memories which took him back to the days before he was a priest; when he had been a young fellow of three or four and twenty, very free from care, very good to look upon, and very much in love.

It was strange, perhaps, that the impending arrival at Montefiano of an elderly lady and a girl of seventeen, neither of whom Don Agostino had ever seen, should arouse in him memories of his own youth; but so it was. Such links in the chain that binds us to the past—a chain that perhaps death itself is powerless to break—are perpetually forging themselves in the present, and often trifles as light as air rivet them.

In this case the link had been forged long ago. Don Agostino remembered the forging of it every time he donned the sacred vestments to say mass, and was conscious that the years had riveted it only more firmly.

It was, perhaps, as well that his housekeeper was busy plucking a chicken in the back premises; and it was certainly as well that none of his flock could have observed their pastor's actions when he had shut himself into his study, otherwise unprofitable surmises, long rejected as such, would have cropped up again round the measures of wine in the Caffè Garibaldi that evening.

For some time Don Agostino sat in front of his writing-table thinking, his face buried in his hands. The joyous chattering of the house-martins flying to and from their nests came through the open windows, and the scent of roses and Madonna lilies. But presently the liquid notes of the swallows changed into the soft lapping of waters rising and falling on marble steps; the scent of the lilies was there, but mingling with it was the salt smell of the lagoons, the warm, silky air blowing in from the Adriatic. The distant sounds from the village street became, in Don Agostino's ears, the cries of the gondoliers and the fishermen, and Venice rose before his eyes—Venice, with the rosy light of a summer evening falling on her palaces and her churches, turning her laughing waters into liquid flame; Venice, with her murmur of music in the air as the gondolas and the fishing-boats glided away from the city across the lagoons to the Lido and the sea; Venice, holding out to him youth and love, and the first sweet dawning of the passion that only youth and love can know.

Suddenly Don Agostino raised his head and looked about him as one looks who wakes from a dream. His eyes fell upon the crucifix standing on his table and on the ivory Christ nailed to it. And then his dream passed.

Rising, he crossed the room, and, unlocking a cabinet, took from it a tiny miniature and one letter—the only one left to him, for he had burned the rest. The keeping of this letter had been a compromise. For do not the best of us make a compromise with our consciences occasionally?

The face in the miniature was that of a young girl—a child almost—but exceedingly beautiful, with the red-gold hair and creamy coloring of the Venetian woman of the Renaissance.

Don Agostino looked at it long; afterwards, almost mechanically, he raised the picture towards his lips. Then, with a sudden gesture, as though realizing what he was about to do, he thrust it back into the drawer of the cabinet. But he kissed the letter before he replaced it beside the miniature.

It was merely another compromise, this time not so much with his conscience, perhaps, as with his priesthood.

"Bianca!" he said, aloud, and his voice dwelt on the name with a lingering tenderness. "Bianca! And she—that other woman—she brings your child here—here, where I am! Well, perhaps it is you who send her—who knows? Perhaps it was you who sent me to Montefiano—you, or the blessed Mother of us all—again, who knows? It was strange, was it not, that of all places they should send me here, where your child was born, the child that should have been—"

The door was flung open hastily, and Don Agostino's housekeeper filled the threshold.

"Madonna mia Santissima!" she exclaimed. "It is your reverence, after all. I thought I heard voices—"

"Yes, Ernana, it is I," said Don Agostino, quietly.

"Accidente! but you frightened me!" grumbled the woman. "I was plucking the chicken for your reverence's supper, and—"

"So I perceive," remarked Don Agostino, watching feathers falling off her person to the floor. "And you heard voices," he added. "Well, I was talking to myself. You can return to the chicken, Ernana, in peace!"

"The chicken is a fat chicken," observed Ernana, reflectively. "A proposito," she added, "will your reverence eat it boiled? It sits more lightly on the stomach at night—boiled."

"I will eat it boiled," said Don Agostino.

"And with a contorno of rice?"

Don Agostino sighed.

"Rice?" he repeated, absently. "Of course, Ernana; with rice, certainly with rice."

III

Palazzo Acorari, the residence in Rome of the princes of Montefiano, was situated, as has already been said, in that old quarter of the city known as the Campitelli. It stood, indeed, but a few yards away from the piazza of the name, in a deserted little square through which few people passed save those whose business took them into the squalid streets and vicoli opening out of the Piazza Montanara.

It was not one of the well-known palaces of Rome, although it was of far greater antiquity than many described at length in the guide-books; neither was it large in comparison with some of its near neighbors. Nine people out of ten, if asked by a stranger to direct them to Palazzo Acorari, would have been unable to reply, although, from a mingled sense of the courtesy due to a forestiero, and fear of being taken for forestiero themselves, they would probably have attempted to do so all the same, to the subsequent indignation of the stranger.

There was no particular reason why Palazzo Acorari should be well known. It contained no famous works of art, and its apartments, though stately in their way, were neither historic nor on a large enough scale to have ever been rented by rich foreigners as a stage on which they could play at being Roman nobles to an appreciative if somewhat cynical audience.

A narrow and gloomy porte cochère opened from the street into the court-yard round which the Palazzo Acorari was built. Except for an hour or two at mid-day no ray of sunlight ever penetrated into this court, which, nevertheless, was picturesque enough with its graceful arches and its time-worn statues mounting guard around it. A porter in faded livery dozed in his little office on one side of the entrance, in the intervals of gossiping with a passer-by on the doings and misdoings of the neighbors, and he, together with a few pigeons and a black cat, were generally the only animate objects to be seen by those who happened to glance into the quadrangle.

The princess and her step-daughter inhabited the first floor of the palace, while the ground-floor was apportioned off into various locali opening on to the streets, in which a cobbler, a retail charcoal and coke vender, a mattress-maker, and others plied their respective trades.

On the second floor, immediately above the princess's apartment, was another suite of rooms. This apartment had been unlet for two or three years, and it was only some six or eight months since it had found a tenant.

The princess was not an accommodating landlady. Possibly she regarded concessions to the tenants of her second floor as works of supererogation—laudable, perhaps, but not necessary to salvation. Moreover, the tenants on the second floor never went to mass—at least, so the Abbé Roux had gathered from the porter, whose business it was to know the concerns of every one dwelling in or near Palazzo Acorari.

There had been, consequently, passages of arms concerning responsibility for the repairs of water-pipes and similar objects, in which it was clearly injurious to the glory of God and the interests of the Church that the princess should be the one to give way. She had been, indeed, on the point of declining the offer of Professor Rossano to take the vacant apartment. He was a well-known scientist, with a reputation which had travelled far beyond the frontiers of Italy, and, in recognition of his work in the domain of physical science, had been created a senator of the Italian kingdom. But a scientific reputation was not a thing which appealed to the princess, regarding as she did all scientific men as misguided and arrogant individuals in league with the freemasons and the devil to destroy faith upon the earth. The Abbé Roux, however, had counselled tolerance, accompanied by an addition of five hundred francs a year to the rent. The apartment had been long unlet, and was considerably out of repair; but the professor had taken a fancy to it, as being in a quiet and secluded position where he could pursue his studies undisturbed by the noise of the tram-cars, which even then were beginning to render the chief thoroughfares of Rome odious to walk and drive in, and still more odious to live in.

As he was a man of some means, he had not demurred at the extra rent which the princess's agent had demanded at the last moment before the signing of the lease. Apart from the fact that he was a scientist and a senator of that kingdom of which the princess affected to ignore the existence, there had seemed to be nothing undesirable about Professor Rossano as a tenant. He was a widower, with a son of four-and-twenty and a daughter a year or two older who lived with him; and, after her tenant's furniture had been carried in and the upholsterers had done their work, the princess had been hardly conscious that the apartment immediately above her own was occupied. On rare occasions she had encountered the professor on the staircase, and had bowed in answer to his salutation; but there was no acquaintance between them, nor did either show symptoms of wishing to interchange anything but the most formal of courtesies. Sometimes, too, when going out for, or returning from, their daily drive, the princess and her step-daughter would meet Professor Rossano's daughter, who was usually accompanied by her maid, a middle-aged person of staid demeanor who seemed to act as a companion to the Signorina Giacinta, as, according to the porter, Senator Rossano's daughter was called. The girls used to look at each other curiously, but weeks went by before a word passed between them.

"They are not of our world," the princess had said, decisively, to Bianca shortly after the Rossanos' arrival, "and there is no necessity for us to know them"—and the girl had nodded her head silently, though with a slight sigh. It was not amusing to be princess of Montefiano in one's own right and do nothing but drive out in a closed carriage every afternoon, and perhaps walk for half an hour outside one of the city gates or in the Villa Pamphili with one's stepmother by one's side and a footman ten paces behind. Bianca Acorari thought she would like to have known Giacinta Rossano, who looked amiable and simpatica, and was certainly pretty. But though there was only the thickness of a floor between them, the two establishments were as completely apart as if the Tiber separated them, and Bianca knew by experience that it would be useless to attempt to combat her step-mother's prejudices. Indeed, she herself regarded the professor and his daughter with a curiosity not unmixed with awe, and would scarcely have been surprised if a judgment had overtaken them even on their way up and down the staircase; for had not Monsieur l'Abbé declared that neither father nor daughter ever went to mass?

This assertion was not strictly true—at any rate, so far as the Signorina Giacinta was concerned. The professor, no doubt, seldom went inside a church, except, perhaps, on special occasions, such as Easter or Christmas. He possessed a scientific conscience as well as a spiritual conscience, and he found an insuperable difficulty in reconciling the one with the other on a certain point of dogma which need not be named. He was not antichristian, however, though he might be anticlerical, and he encouraged Giacinta to go to the churches rather than the reverse, as many fathers of families in his position do, both in Italy and elsewhere.

Professor Rossano and his daughter had inhabited the Palazzo Acorari nearly three months before Bianca made the discovery that the girl at whom she had cast stolen glances of curiosity, as being the first heretic of her own nationality she had ever beheld, was, if appearances spoke the truth, no heretic at all. She had actually seen Giacinta kneeling in the most orthodox manner at mass in the neighboring church of Santa Maria dei Campitelli. Bianca had informed the princess of her discovery that very day at breakfast in the presence of the Abbé Roux, who was an invariable guest on Sundays and feast-days. She nourished a secret hope that her step-mother might become more favorably disposed towards the family on the second floor if it could satisfactorily be proved not to be entirely heretical. The princess, however, did not receive the information in the spirit Bianca had expected.

"People of that sort," she had responded, coldly, "often go to mass in order to keep up appearances, or sometimes to meet—oh, well"—she broke off, abruptly—"to stare about them as you seem to have been doing this morning, Bianca, instead of saying your prayers. Is it not so, Monsieur l'Abbé?" she added to the priest, with whom she generally conversed in French, though both spoke Italian perfectly.

The Abbé Roux sighed. "Ah, yes, madame," he replied, "unluckily it is undoubtedly so. The Professor Rossano, if one is to judge by certain arrogant and anticatholic works of which he is the author, is not likely to have brought up his children to be believers. And if one does not believe, what is the use of going to mass?—except—except—" And here he checked himself as the princess had done, feeling himself to be on the verge of an indiscretion.

"You hear, Bianca, what Monsieur l'Abbé says," observed the princess. "You must understand once for all, that what Professor Rossano and his daughter may or may not do is no concern of ours—"

"So long as they pay their rent," added the Abbé, pouring himself out another glass of red wine.

"So long as they pay their rent," the princess repeated. "They are not of our society—" she continued.

"And do not dance," interrupted Bianca.

The princess looked at her a little suspiciously. She was never quite sure whether Bianca, notwithstanding her quiet and apparently somewhat apathetic disposition, was altogether so submissive as she seemed.

"Dance!" she exclaimed. "Why should they dance? I don't know what you mean, Bianca."

"It is against the contract to dance on the second floor. The guests might fall through on to our heads," observed Bianca, tranquilly. "Bettina told me so, and the porter told her—"

The princess frowned. "Bettina talks too much," she said, with an unmistakable air of desiring that the subject should drop.

Bianca relapsed into silence. It was very evident that, however devout the Rossano girl might be, she would not be allowed to make her acquaintance. Her observant eyes had watched the Abbé Roux's countenance as she made her little effort to further that desired event, for she was very well aware that no step was likely to be taken in this, or, indeed, in any other matter unless the Abbé approved of it. Privately, Bianca detested the priest, and with a child's unerring instinct—for she was still scarcely more than a child in some things—she felt that he disliked her.

Nor was this state of things of recent origin. Ever since the Abbé Roux had become, as it were, a member of the Montefiano household, Bianca Acorari had entertained the same feeling towards him. Her obstinacy on this point, indeed, had first awakened the princess to the fact that her step-daughter had a very decided will of her own, which, short of breaking, nothing was likely to conquer.

This stubbornness, as the princess called it, had shown itself in an unmistakable manner when Bianca, though only twelve years old, had firmly and absolutely refused to confess to Monsieur l'Abbé. In vain the princess had threatened punishment both immediate and future, and in vain the Abbé Roux had admonished her. Make her confession to him, she would not. To any other priest, yes; to him, no—not then or ever. There was nothing more to be said or done—for both the princess and Monsieur l'Abbé knew well enough that the child was within her rights according to the laws of the Church, though of course she herself was unaware of the fact. There had been nothing for it, as weeks went on and Bianca never drew back from the position she had taken up, but to give way as gracefully as might be—but it was doubtful if the Abbé Roux had ever forgiven the want of confidence in him which the child had displayed, although he had afterwards told her that the Church left to all penitents the right of choice as to their confessors.

When Bianca grew older, the princess had intended to send her to the Convent of the Assumption in order to complete her education, and at the same time place her under some discipline. The girl was delicate, however, and it was eventually decided that it was better that she should be educated at home.

Perhaps it was the gradual consciousness that she was debarred from associating with any one of her own age which had made Bianca think wistfully that it would be pleasant to make the acquaintance of the attractive-looking girl whom she passed occasionally on the staircase, and who had come to live under the same roof as herself. She could not but notice that the older she became the more she seemed to be cut off from the society of others of her years. Formerly she had occasionally been allowed to associate with the children of her step-mother's friends and acquaintances, and, at rare intervals, they had been invited to some childish festivity at Palazzo Acorari.

By degrees, however, her life had become more and more isolated, and for the last year or two the princess, a governess who came daily to teach her modern languages and music, and her maid and attendant, Bettina, had been her only companions.

Rightly or wrongly, Bianca associated the restriction of her surroundings with the influence of the Abbé Roux, and the suspicion only increased the dislike she had always instinctively borne him.

It never entered into her head, however, to suggest to the princess that her life was an exceedingly dull one. Indeed, having no means of comparing it with the lives of other girls of her age, she scarcely realized that it was dull, and she accepted it as the natural order of things. It had not been until she had seen Giacinta Rossano that an indefinable longing for some companionship other than that of those much older than herself began to make itself felt within her, and she had found herself wondering why she had no brothers and sisters, no cousins, such as other girls must have, with whom they could associate.

In the mean time, life in Palazzo Acorari went on as usual for Bianca. She fancied that, when they passed each other, the daughter of the mysterious old professor on the second floor who wrote wicked books looked at her with increasing interest; and that once or twice, when Bianca had been accompanied only by Bettina, she had half-paused as though about to speak, but had then thought better of it and walked on with a bow and a slight smile.

On one occasion she had ventured to sound Bettina as to whether it would not be at least courteous on her part to do something more than bow as she passed the Signorina Rossano. But Bettina was very cautious in her reply. The princess, it appeared, had been resolute in forbidding any communication between the two floors, excepting such as might have to be carried on through the medium of the porter, in the case of such a calamity as pipes bursting or roofs leaking.

December was nearly over, and Rome was sotto Natale. People were hurrying through the streets buying their Christmas presents, and thronging the churches to look at the representations of the Holy Child lying in the manger of Bethlehem; for it was Christmas Eve, and the great bells of the basilicas were booming forth the tidings of the birth of Christ. In every house in Rome, among rich and poor alike, preparations were going on for the family gathering that should take place that night, and for the supper that should be eaten after midnight when the strict fast of the Christmas vigil should be over.

The majority, perhaps, paid but little heed to the fasting and abstinence enjoined by the priests, unless the addition of fresh fish to the bill of fare—fish brought from Anzio and Nettuno the day before by the ton weight and sold at the traditional cottìo throughout the night—could be taken as a sign of obedience to the laws of the Church. But the truly faithful conformed rigidly throughout the day, reserving themselves for the meats that would be permissible on the return from the midnight masses, when the birth of a God would be celebrated, as it has ever been, by a larger consumption than usual of the flesh of His most innocent creatures on the part of those who invoke Him as a merciful and compassionate Creator.

This particular Christmas Eve it so happened that the princess was confined to her bed with a severe cold and fever, which made attendance at the midnight masses an impossibility so far as she was concerned. Bianca, however, was allowed to go, accompanied by Bettina, and shortly after half-past eleven they left Palazzo Acorari, meaning to walk to the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in the Piazza Navona, one of the few churches in Rome to which the public were admitted to be present at the three masses appointed to be said at the dawning hours of Christmas Day.

It was raining in torrents as they emerged from the portone of the palazzo, and to get a cab at that hour of night on Christmas Eve appeared to be an impossibility, except, perhaps, in the main streets.

Bianca and her attendant consulted together. They would certainly be wet through before they could reach the Piazza Navona, and it seemed as though there was nothing to be done but to remain at home. Bettina, however, suddenly remembered that at the little church of the Sudario, less than half-way to the Piazza Navona, the midnight masses were also celebrated. To be sure, it was the church of the Piedmontese, and chiefly attended by members of the royal household, and often by the queen herself. The princess would not be altogether pleased, therefore, at the substitution; but, under the circumstances, Bianca expressed her determination of going there, and her maid was obliged to acquiesce.

Five minutes plunging through puddles and mud, and battling with a warm sirocco wind which blew in gusts at the corners of every street, brought them to the little church hidden away behind the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele.

A side door communicating with the building was open, and they passed from the darkness and the driving rain into a blaze of warm light and the mingled scent of incense and flowers. The high altar, adorned with priceless white-and-gold embroideries, sparkled in the radiance of countless wax-candles. Overhead, from a gallery at the opposite end of the church, the organ was playing softly, the player reproducing on the reed-stops the pastoral melodies of the pifferari, in imitation of the pipes of the shepherds watching over their flocks through that wonderful night nineteen centuries ago.

Although it wanted yet twenty minutes to midnight the church was nearly full, and Bianca and her companion made their way to some vacant seats half-way up it. Glancing at her neighbors immediately in front of her, Bianca gave a start of surprise as she recognized Giacinta Rossano.

Bettina's gaze was fixed on the altar, and Bianca hesitated for a moment. Then she leaned forward and whispered timidly, "Buona Natale, buona feste"—with a little smile.

A pair of soft, dark eyes smiled back into her own. "Buona Natale, e buona anno, Donna Bianca." Giacinta Rossano replied, in a low, clear voice which caused Bettina to withdraw her eyes from the altar and to look sharply round to see whence it proceeded. Somebody else turned round also—a young man whom Bianca had not noticed, but who was sitting next to Giacinta. For a moment their eyes met, and then she looked away quickly, half conscious of a sensation of effort in doing so that caused her a vague surprise. The gaze she had suddenly encountered had seemed to enchain her own. The eyes that had looked into hers with a wondering, questioning look were like Giacinta Rossano's, only they were blue—Bianca felt quite sure of that. They had seemed to shut out for a second or two the blaze of light on the altar. The momentary feeling of surprise passed, she turned her head towards the altar again, and as she did so she overheard Giacinta Rossano's companion whisper to her, "Chiè?" accompanied by a rapid backward motion of his head.

Giacinta's reply was inaudible, for at that moment a clear alto voice from the gallery rang out with the opening notes of the Adeste Fideles. The doors of the sacristy opened, and the officiating priest, glittering in his vestments of gold-and-white, knelt before the altar. Venite Adoremus burst forth triumphantly from the choir, the alto voice rising above the rest like an angel's song. Presently, as the strains of the Christmas hymn died away, and the soft reed-notes of the organ resumed the plaintive refrain of the pifferari, the celebrant rose, and then kneeling again on the lowest step of the altar, murmured the Confiteor—and the first mass of the Nativity began.

After the elevation, Bianca Acorari rose from her knees and resumed her seat. The mellow light from the wax-candles glinted upon the tawny gold of her hair and her creamy complexion, both of which she had inherited from her Venetian mother. Many eyes were turned upon her, for though, so far as regularity of features was concerned, she could not be called beautiful, yet her face was striking enough, combining as it did the Italian grace and mobility with a coloring that, but for its warmth, might have stamped her as belonging to some Northern race.

Owing to the general shuffling of chairs consequent upon the members of the congregation resuming their seats after the elevation, Bianca suddenly became aware that Giacinta Rossano's companion had somewhat changed his position, and that he was now sitting where he could see her without, as before, turning half round in his seat. Apparently, too, he was not allowing the opportunity to escape him, for more than once she felt conscious that his eyes were resting upon her; and, indeed, each time she ventured to steal a glance in Giacinta's direction that glance was intercepted—not rudely or offensively, but with the same almost wondering look in the dark-blue eyes that they had worn when they first met her own.

Bianca glanced furtively from Giacinta's companion to Giacinta herself as soon as the former looked away.

Decidedly, she thought, they were very like each other, except in the coloring of the eyes, for Giacinta's eyes were of a deep, velvety brown. Suddenly a light dawned upon her. Of course! this must be Giacinta Rossano's brother—come, no doubt, to spend Christmas with his father and sister. She had always heard that the professor had a son; but as this son had never appeared upon the scene since the Rossanos had lived in the Palazzo Acorari, Bianca had forgotten that he had any existence.

How she wished she had a brother come to spend Christmas with her! It would, at all events, be more amusing than sitting at dinner opposite to Monsieur l'Abbé, which would certainly be her fate the following evening. From all of which reflections it may be gathered that Bianca was not deriving as much spiritual benefit from her attendance at mass as could be desired. Perhaps the thought struck her, for she turned somewhat hastily to Bettina, only to see an expression on that worthy woman's face which puzzled her. It was a curious expression, half-uneasy and half-humorous, and Bianca remembered it afterwards.

The three masses came to an end at last, and to the calm, sweet music of the Pastoral symphony from Händel's Messiah (for the organist at the Sudario, unlike the majority of his colleagues in Rome, was a musician and an artist) the congregation slowly left the church, its members exchanging Christmas greetings with their friends before going home to supper. Bettina hurried her charge through the throng, never slackening speed until they had left the building and turned down a by-street out of the crowd thronging the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele. Even then she glanced nervously over her shoulder from time to time, as though to make sure they were not being followed.

The rain had ceased by this time, and the moon shone in a deep violet sky, softening the grim mass of the Caetani and Antici-Mattei palaces which frowned above them. Presently Bettina halted under a flickering gas-lamp.

"A fine thing, truly," she exclaimed, abruptly, "to go to a midnight mass to stare at a good-looking boy—under the very nose, too, speaking with respect, of the santissimo!"

Bianca flushed. "He looked at me!" she said, indignantly.

"It is the same thing," returned Bettina—"at least," she added, "it is generally the same thing—in the end. Holy Virgin! what would her excellency say—and Monsieur l'Abbé—if they knew such a thing? And the insolence of it! He looked—and looked! Signorina, it is a thing unheard of—"

"What thing?" interrupted Bianca, tranquilly.

"What thing?" repeated Bettina, somewhat taken aback. "Why—why—oh, well," she added, hastily, "it doesn't matter what thing—only, for the love of God, signorina, do not let her excellency know that you spoke to the Signorina Rossano to-night!"

"There was no harm," replied Bianca. "I only wished her a good Christmas—"

"No harm—perhaps not!" returned Bettina; "but, signorina, I do not wish to find myself in the street, you understand—and it is I who would be blamed."

Bianca raised her head proudly. "You need not be afraid," she said. "I do not allow others to be blamed for what I do. As to the Signorina Rossano, I have made her acquaintance, and I mean to keep it. For the rest, it is not necessary to say when or how I made it. Come, Bettina, I hear footsteps."

"You will make the acquaintance of the other one, too," Bettina said to herself—"but who knows whether you will keep it? Mali!" and with a sharp shrug of the shoulders she walked by Bianca's side in silence until they reached Palazzo Acorari, where the porter, who was waiting for them at the entrance, let them through the gateway and lighted them up the dark staircase to the doors of the piano nobile.

IV

"I tell you that it is a pazzia—a madness," said Giacinta Rossano. "The girl is a good girl, and I am sorry for her—shut up in this dreary house with a step-mother and a priest. But we are not of their world, and they are not of ours. The princess has made that very clear from the first."

"And what does it matter?" Silvio Rossano exclaimed, impetuously. "We are not princes, but neither are we beggars. Does not everybody know who my father is, Giacinta? And some day, perhaps, I shall make a name for myself, too—"

Giacinta glanced at her brother proudly.

"Yes," she said, "I believe you will—I am sure you will, if—" And then she hesitated.

"If what?" demanded Silvio.

"If you do not make an imbecile of yourself first," his sister replied, dryly.

Silvio Rossano flung the newspaper he had been reading on to the floor, and his eyes flashed with anger. In a moment, however, the anger passed, and he laughed.

"All men are imbeciles once in their lives," he said, "and most men are imbeciles much more frequently—"

"Oh, with these last it does not matter," observed Giacinta, sapiently; "they do themselves no harm. But you—you are not of that sort, Silvio mio. So before making an imbecile of yourself, it will be better to be sure that it is worth the trouble. Besides, the thing is ridiculous. People do not fall in love at first sight, except in novels—and if they do, they can easily fall out of it again."

"Not the other ones," said Silvio, briefly.

"The other ones? Ah, I understand," and Giacinta looked at him more gravely. She was very fond of this only brother of hers, and very proud of him—proud of his already promising career and of his frank, lovable disposition, as well as of his extreme good looks. In truth, when she compared Silvio with the large majority of young men of his age and standing, she had some reason for her pride. Unlike so many young Romans of the more leisured classes, Silvio Rossano had never been content to lead a useless and brainless existence. Being an only son, he had been exempt from military service; but, instead of lounging in the Corso in the afternoons and frequenting music-halls and other resorts of a more doubtful character at night, he had turned his attention at a comparatively early age to engineering. At the present moment, though barely five-and-twenty, he had just completed the erection of some important water-works at Bari, during the formation of which he had been specially chosen by one of the most eminent engineers in Italy to superintend the works during the great man's repeated absences elsewhere. Thanks to Silvio Rossano's untiring energy and technical skill, as well as to his popularity with his subordinates and workmen, serious difficulties had been overcome in an unusually short space of time, and a government contract, which at one moment looked as if about to be unfulfilled by the company with whom it had been placed, was completed within the period agreed upon. There could be little doubt that, after his last success, Silvio would be given some lucrative work to carry out, and, in the mean time, after an absence of nearly a year, he had come home for a few weeks' rest and holiday, to find his father and sister installed in Palazzo Acorari.

It was, perhaps, not to be wondered at if Giacinta Rossano felt uneasy in her mind on her brother's account. She knew his character as nobody else could know it, for he was barely two years younger than she, and they had grown up together. She knew that beneath his careless, good-natured manner there lay an inflexible will and indomitable energy, and that once these were fully aroused they would carry him far towards the end he might have in view.

The interest that Donna Bianca Acorari had aroused in Silvio had not escaped Giacinta's notice. She had observed where his gaze had wandered so frequently during the midnight mass a few nights previously, and, knowing that Silvio's life had been too busy a one to have left him much time to think about love, she had marvelled at the effect that Bianca Acorari seemed suddenly to have had upon him. Since that night, whenever they were alone together, he would begin to question her as to the surroundings of their neighbors on the floor below them, and urge her to make friends with Donna Bianca. It was in vain that Giacinta pointed out that she had only interchanged a word or two with the girl in her life, and that there was evidently a fixed determination on the princess's part not to permit any acquaintance.

This last argument, she soon discovered, was the very worst that she could use. Like most Romans of the bourgeoisie to which he by birth belonged—and, indeed, like Romans of every class outside the so-called nobility—Silvio was a republican at heart so far as social differences were concerned; nor—in view of the degeneracy of a class which has done all in its power in modern days to vulgarize itself in exchange for dollars, American or otherwise, and to lose any remnant of the traditions that, until a generation ago, gave the Roman noblesse a claim upon the respect of the classes nominally below it—could this attitude be blamed or wondered at.

At first, Giacinta had laughed at her brother for the way in which he had fallen a victim to the attractions of a young girl whom he had never seen before, but she had very soon begun to suspect that Silvio's infatuation was no mere passing whim. She was well aware, too, that passing whims were foreign to his nature. Since that Christmas night, he had been more silent and thoughtful than she had ever seen him, except, perhaps, in his student days, when he had been working more than usually hard before the examinations.

Of Bianca Acorari herself he spoke little, but Giacinta understood that the drift of his conversation generally flowed towards the family on the piano nobile and how its members occupied their day. Moreover, Silvio, she observed, was much more frequently in casa than was altogether natural for a young fellow supposed to be taking a holiday, and he appeared to be strangely neglectful of friends and acquaintances to whose houses he had formerly been ready to go. Another thing, too, struck Giacinta as unusual, and scarcely edifying. Silvio had never been remarkable for an alacrity to go to mass, and Giacinta knew that he shared the professor's views on certain subjects, and that he had little partiality for the clergy as a caste. Apparently, however, he had suddenly developed a devotion to some saint whose relic might or might not be in the church of Santa Maria in Piazza Campitelli, for Giacinta, to her surprise, had met him face to face one morning as she had gone to mass there, and on another occasion she had caught a glimpse of his figure disappearing behind a corner in the same church. It was only charitable, she thought, casually to inform this devout church-goer that the Princess Montefiano had a private chapel in her apartment, in which the Abbé Roux said mass every morning at half-past eight o'clock.

In the mean time, the professor, occupied with his scientific research, was in happy ignorance of the fact that disturbing elements were beginning to be at work within his small domestic circle, and Giacinta kept her own counsel. She hoped that Silvio would soon get some employment which would take him away from Rome, for she was very sure that nothing but mortification and unhappiness would ensue were he to make Bianca Acorari's acquaintance.

Some days had elapsed since Christmas, and Giacinta Rossano had not again seen either Bianca or the princess. Under the circumstances, she by no means regretted the fact, for she rather dreaded lest she and her brother might encounter them on the staircase, and then, if Silvio behaved as he had behaved in the Sudario, the princess would certainly suspect his admiration for her step-daughter.

In Rome, however, families can live under the same roof for weeks, or even months, without necessarily encountering each other, or knowing anything of each other's lives or movements; and it so happened that no opportunity was given to Giacinta, even had she desired it, again to interchange even a formal greeting with the girl who had evidently made such an impression at first sight on her brother.

Of late, too, Silvio's interest in their neighbors had apparently diminished, for he asked fewer questions concerning them, and occasionally, Giacinta thought, almost seemed as though desirous of avoiding the subject.

She was not altogether pleased, however, when, after he had been at home about a month, Silvio one day announced that he had been offered work in Rome which would certainly keep him in the city for the whole summer. It was delightful, no doubt, to have him with them. She saw that her father was overjoyed at the idea, and, had it not been for other considerations, Giacinta would have desired nothing better than that Silvio should live permanently with them, for his being at home made her own life infinitely more varied. She could not help wondering, however, whether Bianca Acorari had anything to do with Silvio's evident satisfaction at remaining in Rome. Hitherto, he had shown eagerness rather than disinclination to get away from Rome, declaring that there was so little money or enterprise in the capital that any young Roman wishing to make his way in the world had better not waste his time by remaining in it.

Now, however, to judge of Silvio's contented attitude, he had found work which would be remunerative enough without being obliged to seek it in other parts of Italy or abroad. And so the weeks went by. Lent was already over, and Easter and spring had come, when Giacinta made a discovery which roused afresh all her uneasiness on her brother's behalf.

In some way or another she began to feel convinced that Silvio had managed either to meet Bianca Acorari, or, at all events, to have some communication with her. For some little time, indeed, she had suspected that his entire cessation from any mention of the girl or her step-mother was not due to his interest in Bianca having subsided. Silvio's interest in anything was not apt easily to subside when once fully aroused, and that it had been fully aroused, Giacinta had never entertained any doubt. Chance furnished her with a clew as to where Silvio's channels of communication might possibly lie, if indeed he could have any direct communication with Donna Bianca, which, under the circumstances, would seem to be almost incredible.

It so happened that one April morning, when summer seemed to have entered into premature possession of its inheritance, when the Banksia roses by the steps of the Ara Coeli were bursting into bloom and the swifts were chasing each other with shrill screams in the blue sky overhead, Giacinta was returning from her usual walk before the mid-day breakfast, and, as she turned into the little piazza in which Palazzo Acorari was situated, she nearly collided with Silvio, apparently engaged in lighting a cigarette. There was nothing unusual in his being there at that hour, for he sometimes returned to breakfast a casa, especially on Thursdays, when little or no work is done in Rome in the afternoons, and this was a Thursday. It struck her, nevertheless, that Silvio seemed to be somewhat embarrassed by her sudden appearance round the corner of the narrow lane which connected the piazza with the Piazza Campitelli. His embarrassment was only momentary, however, and he accompanied her to the palazzo. The cannon at San Angelo boomed mid-day as they turned into the portone, and was answered by the bells of the churches round. As they slowly mounted the staircase, a lady came down it. Giacinta did not know her by sight, and, after she had passed them, she half-turned to look at her, for she fancied that a glance of mutual recognition was exchanged between her and Silvio, though the latter raised his hat only with the formality usual in passing an unknown lady on a staircase. The stranger seemed to hesitate for a moment, as though she were disconcerted at seeing Silvio in another person's company. The lady continued her way, however, and if Giacinta had not happened to look round as she and Silvio turned the corner of the staircase, she probably would have thought no more of her, for she was not particularly remarkable, being merely a quietly dressed woman, perhaps eight-and-twenty or thirty years of age, neither good-looking nor the reverse. But, as Giacinta looked, the lady coughed, and the cough re-echoed up the staircase. At the same time she dropped a folded piece of paper. Apparently she was unconscious that she had done so, for she continued to descend the stairs without turning her head, and disappeared round the angle of the court-yard.

"She has dropped something, Silvio," Giacinta said. "Had you not better go after her? It is a letter, I think."

"Of course!" Silvio answered, a little hastily. "I will catch up with her and give it to her," and he turned and ran down the staircase as he spoke.

Giacinta, leaning over the balustrade, saw him pick up the piece of paper. Then he crumpled it up and thrust it into his pocket.

"That," said Giacinta to herself, "was not prudent of Silvio. One does not crumple up a letter and pocket it if one is about to restore it to its owner, unless one's pocket is its proper destination."

Nevertheless, Silvio continued to pursue the lady, and three or four minutes or more elapsed before he rejoined his sister.

"Well," Giacinta observed, tranquilly. "You gave her back her letter?"

"It was not a letter," said Silvio, "it was only a—a memorandum—written on a scrap of paper. A thing of no importance, Giacinta."

"I am glad it was of no importance," returned Giacinta, not caring to press her original question. "Do you know who she is?" she added.

"I think," answered Silvio, carelessly, "that she must be the lady who comes to teach the princess's daughter."

"Step-daughter," corrected Giacinta, dryly.

"Of course—step-daughter—I had forgotten. Do you know, Giacinta," he continued, "that we shall be very late for breakfast?"

It was a silent affair, that breakfast. The professor had been occupied the whole of the morning in correcting the proofs of a new scientific treatise, and he had even brought to the table some diagrams which he proceeded to study between the courses. Silvio's handsome face wore a thoughtful and worried expression, and Giacinta was engrossed with her own reflections.

Presently Professor Rossano broke the silence. He was eating asparagus, and it is not easy to eat asparagus and verify diagrams at the same time.

"Silvio," he said, mildly, "may one ask whether it is true that you have fallen in love?"

Silvio started, and looked at his father with amazement. Then he recovered himself.

"One may ask it, certainly," he replied, "but—"

"But one should not ask indiscreet questions, eh?" continued the professor. "Well, falling in love is a disease like any other—infectious in the first stage—after that, contagious—decidedly contagious."

Silvio laughed a little nervously. "And in the last stage?" he asked.

"Oh, in the last stage one—peels. H one does not, the affair is serious. I met Giacomelli yesterday—your maestro. He said to me: 'Senator, our excellent Silvio is in love. I am convinced that he is in love. It is a thousand pities; because, when one is in love, one is apt to take false measurements; and for an engineer to take false measurements is a bad thing!' That is what Giacomelli said to me in Piazza Colonna yesterday afternoon."

Silvio looked evidently relieved.

"And may one ask whom I am supposed to be in love with?" he demanded.

"As to that," observed the professor, dryly, "you probably know best. All that I would suggest is, that you do not allow the malady to become too far advanced in the second stage—unless"—and here he glanced at Giacinta—"well, unless you are quite sure that you will peel." And with a quiet chuckle he turned to his diagrams again.

Silvio caught his sister's eyes fixed upon him. Giacinta had perhaps not entirely understood her father's metaphors, but it was very clear to her that others had noticed the change she had observed in Silvio. He had evidently been less attentive to his work than was his wont; and the eminent engineer under whom he had studied and made a name for himself, becoming aware of the fact, had unconsciously divined the true cause of it. The Commendatore Giacomelli had doubtless spoken in jest to the father of his favorite pupil, thinking that a parental hint might be useful in helping Silvio to return to his former diligence. Giacinta knew her father's good-natured cynicism well enough, and felt certain that, though treating the matter as a joke, he had intended to let Silvio know that his superiors had noticed some falling off in his work.

But Giacinta was, unfortunately, only too sure that the right nail had been hit on the head, even if the blow had fallen accidentally. She did not feel uneasy lest her father should discover the fact, nor, if he did so, that he would make any efforts to discover the quarter in which Silvio's affections were engaged. The professor lived a life very much of his own, and his nature was a singularly detached one. His attitude towards the world was that of a quiet and not inappreciative spectator of a high comedy. His interests were centred in the stage, and also in the stage-machinery, and he was always ready to be amused or to sympathize as the case might be, in the passing scenes which that complex machinery produced. Giacinta often wondered whether her father ever thought of the possibility of her marriage, or ever considered that her position as an only daughter was somewhat a lonely one. He had never made the faintest allusion to the subject to her; but she was sure that if she were suddenly to announce to him that she was going to marry, he would receive the information placidly enough, and, when once he had satisfied himself that she had chosen wisely, would think no more about the matter. And it would be the same thing as far as Silvio was concerned—only, in Silvio's case, if Donna Bianca Acorari were the object on which he had set his affections, Giacinta was certain that the professor would not consider the choice a wise one. He had a great dislike to anything in the nature of social unpleasantness, as have many clever people who live in a detached atmosphere of their own. In print, or in a lecture-room, he could hit hard enough, and appeared to be utterly indifferent as to how many enemies he made, or how many pet theories he exploded by a logic which was at times irritatingly humorous and at times severely caustic. But, apart from his pen and his conferences, the Senator Rossano was merely a placid individual, slightly past middle age, with a beard inclining to gray, and a broad, intellectual forehead from under which a pair of keen, brown eyes looked upon life good-naturedly enough. Perhaps the greatest charm about Professor Rossano was his genuine simplicity—the simplicity which is occasionally, but by no means always, the accompaniment of intellectual power, and the possession of which usually denotes that power to be of a very high order. This simplicity deceived others not infrequently, but it never deceived him; on the contrary, it was perpetually adding to his knowledge, scientific and otherwise.

Both Professor Rossano's children had inherited something of their father's nature, but Silvio had inherited it in a more complex way, perhaps, than his sister. In him the scientific tendency had shown itself in the more practical form of a love for the purely mechanical and utilitarian. Nevertheless, he had the same detached nature, the same facility for regarding life from the objective point of view, as his father, and the same good-humored if slightly cynical disposition. Of the two, Giacinta was probably the more completely practical, and had, perhaps, the harder disposition. Nor was this unnatural; for their mother had died when Silvio was a child between five and six years old, and Giacinta, being then nearly eight, had speedily acquired a certain sense of responsibility, which, owing to the professor's absorption in his scientific researches, largely increased as time went on. But Giacinta, also, had her full share of good-nature and sympathy, though she was incapable of, as it were, holding herself mentally aloof from the world around her as did her father and, to a certain degree, her brother.

Breakfast over, Professor Rossano soon retired again to the correction of his proofs, leaving Giacinta and Silvio alone together. For a short time neither of them spoke, and Silvio apparently devoted his whole attention to the proper roasting of the end of a "Verginia" cigar in the flame of a candle. Giacinta meditated on the possible contents of the piece of paper that she felt positive was still lying in a crumpled condition in her brother's pocket, and wondered what particular part the lady who had passed them on the staircase might be playing in the business—though she had already made a very natural guess at it. She would have given a good deal to know whether the note—or the memorandum, as Silvio had called it, with a possibly unconscious humor that had made Giacinta smile—was written by Bianca Acorari herself or by the quietly dressed young person who was, no doubt, Bianca's daily governess. If it were from Donna Bianca, then things must have advanced to what the professor would have termed the contagious stage—only Giacinta did not employ that simile, its suggestiveness having escaped her—which would be a decidedly serious affair. If, however, as was far more probable, the missive came from the governess, who had been disappointed of the expected opportunity to give it to Silvio unobserved, and so had dropped it for him to pick up, the matter was serious, too, but not so serious. If Silvio had won over the governess to aid him in furthering his plans, Giacinta thought that she, too, might manage to do a little corrupting on her own account with the same individual. It did not immediately strike her that Silvio's sex, as well as his particularly attractive face and personality, might have removed many difficulties out of his path in dealing with the demure-looking female who devoted three hours a day to the improvement of Donna Bianca's education.

Presently, Giacinta became restive under the prolonged silence which followed the professor's departure from the room.

"You see, Silvio," she observed, as though she were merely continuing an interrupted conversation, "it is not only I who notice that you have had your head in the clouds lately—oh, ever since Christmas. And first of all, people will say: 'He is in love'—as Giacomelli said to papa yesterday; and then they will begin to ask: 'Who is the girl?' And then, very soon, some busybody will find out. It is always like that. And then—"

"Yes, Giacinta—and then?" repeated Silvio.

"I will tell you!" returned Giacinta, decidedly. "Then that priest, Monsieur l'Abbé Roux, as they call him, will be sent by the princess to see papa, and there will be well, a terrible disturbo—"

"The Abbé Roux can go to hell," observed Silvio.

"Afterwards—yes, perhaps. Papa has several times given him a similar permission. But in the mean time he will make matters exceedingly unpleasant. After all, Silvio," Giacinta continued, "let us be reasonable. The girl is an heiress—a princess in her own right, and we—we are not noble. You know what the world would say."

Silvio Rossano glanced at her.

"We are Romans," he said, "of a family as old as the Acorari themselves. It is true that we are not noble. Perhaps, when we look at some of those who are, it is as well! But we are not poor, either, Giacinta—not so poor as to have to be fed by rich American and English adventurers at the Grand Hôtel, like some of your nobles."

Giacinta shrugged her shoulders. "Donna Bianca Acorari is of that class," she said, quietly.

Silvio instantly flew into a rage. "That is so like a woman!" he retorted. "Do you suppose I meant to imply that all our nobles are like that? Each class has its canaglia, and the pity of it is that the foreigners as a rule see more of our canaglia than they do of the rest, and judge us accordingly. As to Donna Bianca Acorari, we can leave her name out of the discussion—"

Giacinta laughed. "Scarcely," she said; "but, Silvio mio, you must not be angry. You know that I do not care at all whether people are noble by birth or whether they are not. All the same, I think you are preparing for yourself a great deal of mortification; and for that girl, if you make her care for you, a great deal of unhappiness. You see how she is isolated. Does anybody, even of their own world, ever come to visit the princess and Donna Bianca? A few old women come occasionally, and a few priests—but that is all. Who or what the girl is being kept for I do not know—but it is certainly not for marriage with one not of her condition. Besides, except as her fidanzato, what opportunity could you have, or ever hope to have, of seeing her or of knowing what her feelings might be towards you?"

"And if I know them already?" burst out Silvio.

Giacinta looked grave.

"If you know them already," she said, "it means—well, it means that somebody has been behaving like an idiot."

"I, for instance!" exclaimed Silvio.

"Certainly, you—before anybody, you. Afterwards—"

"Afterwards—?"

"The woman who dropped the note that you have in your pocket."

"Giacinta!"

"Oh, I am not an imbecile, you know, Silvio. You were waiting for that woman to come away from her morning's lessons with Bianca, and I do not suppose it is the first time that you have waited for her—and—and, what is to be the end of it all, Heaven only knows," concluded Giacinta. It was a weak conclusion, and she was fully aware of the fact; but a look on Silvio's face warned her that she had said enough for the moment.

He took his cigar from his lips and threw it out of the open window. Then, rising from his chair, he came and stood by his sister.

"I will tell you the end of it," he said, very quietly—and his eyes seemed to send forth little flashes of light as he spoke. "The end of it will be that I will marry Bianca Acorari. You quite understand, Giacinta? Noble or not, heiress or not, I will marry her, and she will marry me."

"But, Silvio—it is impossible—it is a madness—"

"Basta! I say that I will marry her. Have I failed yet in anything that I have set myself to do, Giacinta? But you," he added, in a sterner voice than Giacinta had ever heard from him—"you will keep silence. You will know nothing, see nothing. If the time comes when I need your help, I will come to you and ask you to give it me, as I would give it you."

Giacinta was silent for a moment. Then she plucked up her courage to make one more effort to stem the current of a passion that she felt would carry Silvio away with it, she knew not whither.

"But the girl," she said, "she is almost a child still, Silvio. Have you thought what unhappiness you may bring upon her if—if the princess, and that priest who, they say, manages all her affairs, should prove too strong for you? You do not know; they might put her in a convent—anywhere—to get her away from you."

Silvio Rossano swore under his breath.

"Basta, Giacinta!" he exclaimed again. "I say that I will marry her."

And then, before Giacinta had time to reply, he suddenly kissed her and went quickly out of the room.

V

Giacinto Rossano was quite mistaken in supposing the piece of paper she had seen her brother thrust into his pocket to have been still there when he returned to her after its pretended restoration to its rightful owner. As a matter of fact, a capricious April breeze was blowing its scattered remnants about the court-yard of Palazzo Acorari, for Silvio had torn it into little shreds so soon as he had read the words written upon it.

She had been perfectly correct, however, in her other suppositions, for since Silvio had first beheld Donna Bianca in the church of the Sudario on Christmas night, he had certainly not wasted his time. He had been, it is true, considerably dismayed at learning from Giacinta who the girl was who had so immediate and so powerful an attraction for him. Had she been almost anything else than what she was, he thought to himself impatiently, the situation would have been a far simpler one; but between him and the heiress and last remaining representative of the Acorari, princes of Montefiano, there was assuredly a great gulf fixed, not in rank only, but in traditional prejudices of caste, in politics—even, it might be said, in religion—since Bianca Acorari no doubt implicitly believed all that the Church proposed to be believed, while he, like most educated laymen, believed—considerably less.

Perhaps the very difficulties besetting his path made Silvio Rossano the more determined to conquer them and tread that path to the end. What he had said of himself to his sister, not in any spirit of conceit, but rather in the confident assurance which his youth and ardent temperament gave him, was true. When he had set his mind on success, he had always gained it in the end; and why should he not gain it now?

After all, there were things in his favor. Although he might not be of noble blood, his family was a good and an old one. There had been Rossano in Rome before a peasant of the name of Borghese became a pope and turned his relations into princes. One of these early Rossano, indeed, had been a cardinal. But, unluckily for the family, he had also been a conscientious priest and an honest man—a combination rarely to be met with in the Sacred College of those days.

But there were other things to which Silvio attached more weight—things of the present which must ever appeal to youth more than those of the past. His father was a distinguished man; and he himself might have—nay, would have—a distinguished career before him. Money, too, was not wanting to him. The professor was not a rich man; but he had considerably more capital to divide between his two children than many people possessed who drove up and down the Corso with coronets on their carriages, while their creditors saluted them from the pavements.

And there were yet other things which Silvio, reflecting upon the wares he had to go to market with, thought he might fairly take into account, details such as good character, good health, and—well, for some reason or other, women had never looked unfavorably upon him, though he had hitherto been singularly indifferent as to whether they did so or not. Something—the professor would no doubt have found a scientific explanation of a radio-active nature for it—told him, even in that instant when he first met her glance, that Bianca Acorari did not find him antipatico. He wondered very much how far he had been able to convey to her his impressions as regarded herself.

In an incredibly short space of time it had become absolutely necessary to him to satisfy his curiosity on this point—hence that sudden desire to attend the early masses at Santa Maria in Campitelli, which had done more than anything else to arouse Giacinta's suspicions.

For some weeks, however, Silvio had been absolutely foiled in his attempts again to find himself near Bianca Acorari. He had very quickly realized that any efforts on his sister's part to improve her acquaintance with the girl would be detrimental rather than the reverse to his own objects, and he had, consequently, soon ceased to urge Giacinta to make them. But Silvio Rossano had not spent several years of his boyhood in drawing plans and making calculations for nothing; and he had set himself to think out the situation in much the same spirit as that in which he would have grappled with a professional problem demanding accurate solution.

Occasionally he had caught glimpses of Bianca as she went out driving with the princess, and once or twice he had seen her walking in the early morning, accompanied by the same woman who had been with her in the Sudario. It had been impossible, of course, for him to venture to salute her, even if he had not fancied that her companion eyed him sharply, as though suspecting that his proximity was not merely accidental.

Bettina was probably unconscious that she had been more than once the subject of a searching study on the part of the signorino of the second floor, as she called him. But the results of the study were negative, for Silvio had instinctively felt that any attempt to suborn Donna Bianca's maid would almost certainly prove disastrous. The woman was not young enough to be romantic, he thought, with some shrewdness, nor old enough to be avaricious.

And so he had found himself obliged to discover a weaker point in the defences of Casa Acorari, and this time fortune favored him; though in those calmer moments, when scruples of conscience are apt to become so tiresome, he felt somewhat ashamed of himself for taking advantage of it.

It had not escaped Silvio's notice that punctually at nine o'clock every morning a neatly dressed Frenchwoman entered Palazzo Acorari, and was admitted into the princess's apartment, and the porter informed him that she was the principessina's governess, who came from nine o'clock till twelve every day, excepting Sundays and the great feste.

Silvio studied Donna Bianca's governess as he had studied her maid. Mademoiselle Durand was certainly much younger than the latter, and better looking. Moreover, unlike Bettina, she did not look at Silvio witheringly when she happened to meet him in or near Palazzo Acorari, but perhaps a little the reverse. At any rate, after a few mornings on which bows only were exchanged between them, Silvio felt that he might venture to remark on the beauty of the spring weather. He spoke French fluently, though with the usual unmistakable Italian accent, and his overtures were well received.

Mademoiselle Durand smiled pleasantly. "Monsieur lived in Palazzo Acorari, did he not? A son of the famous Professor Rossano? Ah, yes—she had heard him lecture at the Collegio Romano. But perhaps it would be as well not to say so to Madame la Princesse. Madame la Princesse did not approve of science"—and Mademoiselle Durand looked at him, smiling again. Then she colored a little, for her glance had been one of obvious admiration, though Silvio, full of his own thoughts, was not aware of it.

After that, the ice once broken, it had been an easy matter to become fairly intimate with Donna Bianca's instructress. Knowing the precise hour at which she was accustomed to leave Palazzo Acorari, Silvio frequently managed to meet her as she crossed the Piazza Campitelli on her way back to her abode in the Via d'Ara Coeli, where she occupied a couple of rooms over a small curiosity shop.

Fortunately, probably, for Silvio, Mademoiselle Durand very soon discovered that it was due to no special interest in herself if this good-looking young Roman sought her acquaintance. It had scarcely struck him that his advances might easily be misinterpreted; and, indeed, for the space of a few days there had been not a little danger of this misinterpretation actually occurring. The shrewdness of her race, however, had prevented Mademoiselle Durand from deceiving herself; and Silvio's questions, which he flattered himself were triumphs of subtle diplomacy, speedily revealed to her how and where the land lay.

On the whole, the thought of lending herself to a little intrigue rather commended itself to the Frenchwoman. Life in Rome was not very amusing, and to be the confidante in a love-affair, and especially in such an apparently hopeless love-affair, would add an interest to it. Perhaps a little of the sentimentality, the existence of which in Bettina Silvio had doubted, entered into the matter. Mademoiselle Durand liked her pupil, and had always secretly pitied her for the dulness and isolation of her life; and as for Silvio—well, when he looked at her with his soft Roman eyes, and seemed to be throwing himself upon her generosity and compassion, Mademoiselle Durand felt that she would do anything in the world he asked her to do. The Princess of Montefiano she regarded as a mere machine in the hands of the Abbé Roux. Though she had only been a few moments in her present position, Mademoiselle Durand had fully realized that the Abbé Roux was master in the Montefiano establishment; and, though she had been highly recommended to the princess by most pious people, she entertained a cordial dislike to priests except in church, where, she averred, they were necessary to the business, and no doubt useful enough.

"It is Monsieur l'Abbé of whom you must beware," she insisted to Silvio, after she was in full possession of his secret. "The princess is an imbecile—so engaged in trying to secure a good place in the next world that she has made herself a nonentity in this. No—it is of the priest you must think. I do not suppose it would suit him that Donna Bianca should marry."

"Does he want to put her in a convent, then?" asked Silvio, angrily, on hearing this remark.

"But no, Monsieur Silvio! Convents are like husbands—they want a dowry." She looked at Silvio sharply as she spoke, but it was clear to her that he was quite unconscious of any possible allusion to himself in her words.

"It is true, mademoiselle," he answered, thoughtfully. "I forgot that. It is a very unlucky thing that Donna Bianca Acorari has not half a dozen brothers and as many sisters; for then she would have very little money, I should imagine, and no titles."

Mademoiselle Durand hesitated for a moment. Then she looked at him again, and this time her black eyes no longer had the same shrewd, suspicious expression.

"Tiens!" she muttered to herself; and then she said, aloud: "And what do you want me to do for you, Monsieur Silvio? You have not confided in me for nothing—hein? Am I to take your proposals for Donna Bianca's hand to Madame la Princesse? It seems to me that monsieur your father is the fit and proper person to send on such an errand, and not a poor governess."

"Per Carità!" exclaimed Silvio, relapsing in his alarm into his native tongue. "Of course I do not mean that, mademoiselle. I thought perhaps—that is to say, I hoped—"

He looked so disconcerted that Mademoiselle Durand laughed outright.

"No, mon ami," she replied. "I may call you that, Monsieur Silvio, may I not, since conspirators should be friends? I promise you I will not give your secret away. All the same, unless I am mistaken, there is one person to whom you wish me to confide it—is it not so?"

"Yes," replied Silvio; "there is certainly one person."

"But it will not be easy," continued Mademoiselle Durand, "and it will take time. Yes," she added, as though to herself—"it will be fairly amusing to outwit Monsieur l'Abbé—only—only—" and then she paused, hesitatingly.

"Only?" repeated Silvio, interrogatively.

"Ma foi, monsieur, only this," exclaimed his companion, energetically, "that I like the child, and I do not wish any harm to come to her through me. Have you thought well, Monsieur Silvio? You say that you love her, and that she can learn to love you; you will marry her if she be twenty times Princess of Montefiano. Well, I believe that you love her; and if a good countenance is any proof of a good heart, your love should be worth having. But if you make her love you, and are not strong enough to break down the barriers which will be raised to prevent her from marrying you, will you not be bringing on her a greater unhappiness than if you left her to her natural destiny?"

Silvio was silent for a moment. Was this not what Giacinta had said to him more than once? Then a dogged expression came over his face—his eyes seemed to harden suddenly, and his lips compressed themselves.

"Her destiny is to be my wife," he said, briefly.

Mademoiselle Durand shot a quick glance of approval at him.

"Diable!" she exclaimed, "but you Romans have wills of your own even in these days, it seems. And suppose the girl never learns to care for you—how then, Monsieur Silvio? Will you carry her off as your ancestors did the Sabine women?"

Silvio shrugged his shoulders. "She will learn to care for me," he said, "if she is properly taught."

Mademoiselle Durand laughed. "Tiens!" she murmured again. "And I am to give her a little rudimentary instruction—to prepare her, in short, for more advanced knowledge? Oh, la, la! Monsieur Silvio, you must know that such things do not come within the province of a daily governess."

"But you see her for three hours every day," returned Silvio, earnestly. "In three hours one can do a great deal," he continued.

"A great deal too much sometimes!" interrupted Mademoiselle Durand rapidly, under her breath.

"And when it is day after day," proceeded Silvio, "it is much easier. A word here, and a word there, and she would soon learn that there is somebody who loves her—somebody who would make her a better husband than some brainless idiot of her own class, who will only want her money and her lands. And then, perhaps, if we could meet—if she could hear it all from my lips, she would understand."

Mademoiselle Durand gave a quick little sigh. "Oh," she said, "if she could learn it all from your lips, I have no doubt that she would understand very quickly. Most women would, Monsieur Silvio."

"That is what I thought," observed Silvio, naïvely.

The Frenchwoman tapped her foot impatiently on the ground.

"Well," she said, after a pause, "I will see what I can do. But you must be patient. Only, do not blame me if things go wrong—for they are scarcely likely to go right, I should say. For me it does not matter. I came to Rome to learn Italian and to teach French—and other things. I have done both; and in any case, when my engagement with Madame la Princesse is over, I shall return to Paris, and then perhaps go to London or Petersburg—who knows? So if my present engagement were to end somewhat abruptly, I should be little the worse. Yes—I will help you, mon ami—if I can. Oh, not for money—I am not of that sort—but for—well, for other things."

"What other things?" asked Silvio, absently.

Mademoiselle Durand fairly stamped her foot this time.

"Peste!" she exclaimed, sharply. "What do they matter—the other things? Let us say that I want to play a trick on the princess; to spite the priest—by-the-way, Monsieur l'Abbé sometimes looks at me in a way that I am sure you never look at women, Monsieur Silvio! Let us say that I am sorry for that poor child, who will lead a stagnant existence till she is a dried-up old maid, unless somebody rescues her. All these things are true, and are they not reasons enough?"

And Silvio was quite satisfied that they were so.

VI

Bianca Acorari was sitting by herself in the room devoted to her own especial use, where she studied in the mornings with Mademoiselle Durand, and, indeed, spent most of her time. It was now the beginning of June—the moment in all the year, perhaps, when Rome is the most enjoyable; when the hotels are empty, and the foreigners have fled before the imaginary spectres of heat, malaria, and other evils to which those who remain in the city during the late spring and summer are popularly supposed to fall victims.

Entertainments, except those of an intimate character, being at an end, the American invasion has rolled northward. The gaunt English spinsters, severe of aspect, and with preposterous feet, who have spent the winter in the environs of the Piazza di Spagna with the double object of improving their minds and converting some of the "poor, ignorant Roman Catholics" to Protestantism, have gone northward too, to make merriment for the inhabitants of Perugia, or Sienna, of Venice, and a hundred other hunting-grounds. Only the German tourists remain, carrying with them the atmosphere of the bierhalle wherever they go, and generally behaving themselves as though Italy were a province of the fatherland. In the summer months Rome is her true self, and those who know her not then know her not at all.

To Bianca Acorari, however, all seasons of the year were much the same, excepting the three months or so that she passed in the villa near Velletri. To these months she looked forward with delight. The dull routine of her life in Rome was interrupted, and any variety was something in the nature of an excitement. It was pleasanter to be able to wander about the gardens and vineyards belonging to the villa than to drive about Rome in a closed carriage, waiting perhaps for an hour or more outside some convent or charitable institution while her step-mother was engaged in pious works. At the Villa Acorari, she could at all events walk about by herself, so long as she did not leave its grounds. But these grounds were tolerably extensive, and there were many quiet nooks whither Bianca was wont to resort and dream over what might be going on in that world around her, of which she supposed it must be the natural lot of princesses to know very little. The absence of perpetual supervision, the sense of being free to be alone out-of-doors if she chose to be so, was a luxury all the more enjoyable after eight months spent in Palazzo Acorari.

But within the last few weeks Bianca Acorari had become vaguely conscious of the presence of something fresh in her life, something as yet indefinable, but around which her thoughts, hitherto purely abstract, seemed to concentrate themselves. The world was no longer quite the unknown realm peopled with shadows that it had till recently appeared to her to be. It held individuals; individuals in whom she could take an interest, and who, if she was to believe what she was told, took an interest in her. That it was a forbidden interest—a thing to be talked about with bated breath, and that only to one discreet and sympathizing friend, did not by any means diminish its fascination.

It had spoken well for Mademoiselle Durand's capabilities of reading the characters of her pupils that she had at once realized that what Bianca Acorari lacked in her life was human sympathy. This the girl had never experienced; but, all the same, it was evident to any one who, like Mademoiselle Durand, had taken the trouble to study her nature, that she was unconsciously crying out for it. There was, indeed, not a person about her with whom she had anything in common. The princess, wrapped up in her religion and in her anxiety to keep her own soul in a proper state of polish, was an egoist, as people perpetually bent upon laying up for themselves treasure in heaven usually are. And Bianca practically had no other companion than her stepmother except servants, for the few people she occasionally saw at rare intervals did not enter in the smallest degree into her life.

Mademoiselle Durand had very soon discovered Bianca's desire to know the girl who lived in the apartment above her, and her annoyance that she had not been allowed to make any acquaintance with the Signorina Rossano. This very natural wish on her pupil's part to make friends with some one of her own sex, and more nearly approaching her own age than the people by whom she was surrounded, had afforded Mademoiselle Durand the very opening she required in order to commence her campaign in Silvio Rossano's interests. As she had anticipated, it had proved no difficult matter to sing the praises of the brother while apparently conversing with Bianca about the sister, and it must be confessed that she sang Silvio's praises in a manner by no means half-hearted. Nor did Mademoiselle Durand find that her efforts fell upon altogether unwilling ears. It was evident that in some way or another Bianca's curiosity had been already aroused, and that she was not altogether ignorant of the fact that the heretical professor's good-looking son regarded her with some interest.

Mademoiselle Durand, indeed, was somewhat surprised at the readiness displayed by her pupil to discuss not only Giacinta, but also Giacinta's brother, and she at first suspected that things were a little further advanced than Silvio had pretended to be the case.

She soon came to the conclusion, however, that this was not so, and that Bianca's curiosity was at present the only feeling which had been aroused in her.

Mademoiselle Durand was not particularly well-read in her Bible; but she did remember that curiosity in woman had, from the very beginning of things, been gratified by man, and also that the action of a third party had before now been necessary in order to bring the desired object within the reach of both. She was aware that the action of the third party had not been regarded as commendable; nevertheless, she quieted any qualms of conscience by the thought that, after all, circumstances in this case were somewhat different.

On this particular June afternoon Bianca Acorari was free to amuse herself in-doors as she chose until five o'clock, at which hour the princess had ordered the carriage, and Bianca would have to accompany her to visit an orphanage outside the Porta Pia. She was not at all sorry for those orphans. An orphan herself, she had always thought their life must be certainly more amusing than her own, and she had once ventured to hint as much, to the manifest annoyance of her step-mother, who had reproved her for want of charity.

The afternoon was warm, and Bianca, tired of reading, and still more tired of a certain piece of embroidery destined to serve as an altar-frontal for a convent-chapel, sat dreaming in the subdued light coming through closed persiennes. Through the open windows she could hear the distant noise of the traffic in the streets, the monotonous cry of Fragole! Fragole! of the hawkers of fresh strawberries from Nemi and the Alban Hills, and now and again the clock of some neighboring church striking the quarters of the hour.

In a little more than a fortnight, Bianca was saying to herself with satisfaction—when St. Peter's day was over, before which festival the princess would never dream of leaving Rome—she would be at the Villa Acorari, away from the dust and the glare of the city, passing those hot hours of the day in the deep, cool shade of the old ilex-trees, and listening to the murmur of the moss-grown fountains in the quiet grounds, half garden and half wilderness, that surrounded the house.