All Rome was alive with expectation.  The date fixed was the first of January, and as the day approached the curious foreigner mustered in his thousands and tens of thousands and took the city by storm.  The hotels were thronged.  The billiard tables were let as furnished rooms, people slept in the lifts, on the landings, in the porters’ lodges.  The thrifty Romans retreated to roofs and cellars and let their small dwellings.  People reaching the city on the last night slept in the cabs they had hired to take them to St. Peter’s before dawn.  Even the supplies of food ran low and the hungry fed on what they could get, while the delicate of taste very often did not feed at all.  There was of course the usual scare about a revolutionary demonstration, to which the natives paid very little attention, but which delighted the foreigners.

Not more than half of those who hoped to witness the ceremony saw anything of it, though the basilica will hold some eighty thousand people at a pinch, and the crowd on that occasion was far greater than at the opening of the Oecumenical Council in 1869.

Madame d’Aragona had also determined to be present, and she expressed her desire to Gouache.  She had spoken the strict truth when she had said that she knew no one in Rome, and so far as general accuracy is concerned it was equally true that she had not fixed the length of her stay.  She had not come with any settled purpose beyond a vague idea of having her portrait painted by the French artist, and unless she took the trouble to make acquaintances, there was nothing attractive enough about the capital to keep her.  She allowed herself to be driven about the town, on pretence of seeing churches and galleries, but in reality she saw very little of either.  She was preoccupied with her own thoughts and subject to fits of abstraction.  Most things seemed to her intensely dull, and the unhappy guide who had been selected to accompany her on her excursions, wasted his learning upon her on the first morning, and subsequently exhausted the magnificent catalogue of impossibilities which he had concocted for the especial benefit of the uncultivated foreigner, without eliciting so much as a look of interest or an expression of surprise.  He was a young and fascinating guide, wearing a white satin tie, and on the third day he recited some verses of Stecchetti and was about to risk a declaration of worship in ornate prose, when he was suddenly rather badly scared by the lady’s yellow eyes, and ran on nervously with a string of deceased popes and their dates.

“Get me a card for the Jubilee,” she said abruptly.

“An entrance is very easily procured,” answered the guide.  “In fact I have one in my pocket, as it happens.  I bought it for twenty francs this morning, thinking that one of my foreigners would perhaps take it of me.  I do not even gain a franc—­my word of honour.”

Madame d’Aragona glanced at the slip of paper.