for France imperial, regal or republican he never paused to ask; he was wounded in fighting against the Commune, and decorated for painting the portrait of Gambetta, after which he returned to Rome, cursed politics and married the woman he loved, which was, on the whole, the wisest course he could have followed.  He has two children, both girls, aged now respectively fifteen and thirteen.  His virtues are many, but they do not include economy.  Though his savings are small and he depends upon his brush, he lives in one wing of an historic palace and gives dinners which are famous.  He proposes to reform and become a miser when his daughters are married.

“Misery will be the foundation of my second manner, my angel,” he says to his wife, when he has done something unusually extravagant.

But Faustina laughs softly and winds her arm about his neck as they look together at the last great picture.  Anastase has not grown fat.  The gods love him and have promised him eternal youth.  He can still buckle round his slim waist the military belt of twenty years ago, and there is scarcely one white thread in his black hair.

San Giacinto, the other Saracinesca, who married Faustina’s elder sister Flavia, is in process of making a great fortune, greater perhaps than the one so nearly thrust upon him by old Montevarchi’s compact with Meschini the librarian and forger.  He had scarcely troubled himself to conceal his opinions before the change of government, being by nature a calm, fearless man, and under the new order he unhesitatingly sided with the Italians, to the great satisfaction of Flavia, who foresaw years of dulness for the mourning party of the Blacks.  He had already brought to Rome the two boys who remained to him from his first marriage with Serafina Baldi—­the little girl who had been born between the other two children had died in infancy—­and the lads had been educated at a military college, and in 1887 are both officers in the Italian cavalry, sturdy and somewhat thick-skulled patriots, but gentlemen nevertheless in spite of the peasant blood.  They are tall fellows enough but neither of them has inherited the father’s colossal stature, and San Giacinto looks with a very little envy on his young kinsman Orsino who has outgrown his cousins.  This second marriage has brought him issue, a boy and a girl, and the fact that he has now four children to provide for has had much to do with his activity in affairs.  He was among the first to see that an enormous fortune was to be made in the first rush for land in the city, and he realised all he possessed, and borrowed to the full extent of his credit to pay the first instalments on the land he bought, risking everything with the calm determination and cool judgment which lay at the root of his strong character.  He was immensely successful, but though he had been bold to recklessness at the right moment, he saw the great crash looming in the near future, and when the many were frantic to buy