LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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