“And you,” he said, apostrophising the rose with a protesting shake of his head, “were nearly making me forget it!” He lifted the flower out of the water and touched it with his lips.  “She was a fair creature,—­the woman who wore you last night!”—­he said with a smile as he put it carefully back again in its glass, “In fact, she was very much like you!  But though I notice you have no thorns, I dare say she has!” He paused a moment, lost in thought, the smile still giving warmth and light to his features; then with a quick movement of impatience at his own delaying, threw on his coat and hat and left the room, saying, “Now for Gherardi!”

XIX.

Set square and dark against the pale blue of the Italian sky the Palazzo Sovrani, seen for the first time, suggests a prison rather than a dwelling house,—­a forbidding structure, which though of unsentient marble, seems visibly to frown into the light, and exhale from itself a cloud on the clearest day.  Its lowest windows, raised several feet from the ground, and barred across with huge iron clamps, altogether deprive the would-be inquisitive stranger from the possibility of peering within,—­the monstrous iron gate, richly wrought with fantastic scroll-work and heraldic emblems raised in brass, presents so cold and forbidding a front that some of the youthful ladies who were Angela’s friends, were wont to declare that it gave them a palpitation of the heart to summon up the necessary courage required to ring the great bell.  Within the house there was much of a similar gloom, save in Angela’s own studio, which she had herself made beautiful with a brightness and lightness found in no other corner of the vast and stately abode.  Her father, Prince Pietro Sovrani, was of a reserved and taciturn nature,—­poor but intensely proud—­and he would suffer no interference by so much as a word or a suggestion respecting the manner in which he chose to arrange or to order his household.  His wife Gita Bonpre, the only sister of the good Cardinal, had been the one love of his life,—­and when she died all his happiness had died with her,—­his heart was broken, but he showed nothing of his grief to the outside world, save that in manner he was more silent and reserved than ever,—­more difficult to deal with,—­more dangerous to approach.  People knew well enough that he was poor, but they never dared to mention it,—­ though once an English acquaintance, moved by the best intentions in the world, had suggested that he could make a good deal of money by having a portion of the Palazzo Sovrani redecorated, and modernized, to suit the comfort and convenience of travelling millionaires who might probably be disposed to pay a high rent for it during the Roman “season.”  But the proposal was disastrous in its results.  Sovrani had turned upon his adviser like an embodied thunder-cloud.

“When a prince of the House of Sovrani lets out apartments,” he said, “you may ask your English Queen to take in washing!”