On the upper terrace a dozen lacqueys with wax lights hastened out to receive the travellers.  A laughing group followed, headed by a tall vivacious woman covered with jewels, whom Odo guessed to be the Procuratessa Bra.  The Marquess, hastening forward, kissed the lady’s hand, and turned to summon the actors, who hung back at the farther end of the terrace.  The light from the windows and from the lacquey’s tapers fell full on the motley band, and Odo, roused to the singularity of his position, was about to seek shelter behind the Pantaloon when he heard a cry of recognition, and Mirandolina, darting out of the Procuratessa’s circle, fell at that lady’s feet with a whispered word.

The Procuratessa at once advanced with a smile of surprise and bade the Cavaliere Valsecca welcome.  Seeing Odo’s embarrassment, she added that his Highness of Monte Alloro had already apprised her of the cavaliere’s coming, and that she and her husband had the day before despatched a messenger to Venice to enquire if he were already there to invite him to the villa.  At the same moment a middle-aged man with an air of careless kindly strength emerged from the house and greeted Odo.

“I am happy,” said he bowing, “to receive at Bellocchio a member of the princely house of Pianura; and your excellency will no doubt be as well-pleased as ourselves that accident enables us to make acquaintance without the formalities of an introduction.”

This, then, was the famous Procuratore Bra, whose house had given three Doges to Venice, and who was himself regarded as the most powerful if not the most scrupulous noble of his day.  Odo had heard many tales of his singularities, for in a generation of elegant triflers his figure stood out with the ruggedness of a granite boulder in a clipped and gravelled garden.  To hereditary wealth and influence he added a love of power seconded by great political sagacity and an inflexible will.  If his means were not always above suspicion they at least tended to statesmanlike ends, and in his public capacity he was faithful to the highest interests of the state.  Reports differed as to his private use of his authority.  He was noted for his lavish way of living, and for a hospitality which distinguished him from the majority of his class, who, however showy in their establishments, seldom received strangers, and entertained each other only on the most ceremonious occasions.  The Procuratore kept open house both in Venice and on the Brenta, and in his drawing-rooms the foreign traveller was welcomed as freely as in Paris or London.  Here, too, were to be met the wits, musicians and literati whom a traditional morgue still excluded from many aristocratic houses.  Yet in spite of his hospitality (or perhaps because of it) the Procuratore, as Odo knew, was the butt of the very poets he entertained, and the worst satirised man in Venice.  It was his misfortune to be in love with his wife; and this state of mind (in itself sufficiently ridiculous) and the shifts