This black door was never quite closed during the day.  It admitted anybody who chose to push it into a small ante-room, on one side of which might be seen through a glass door a long low vaulted room, or gallery rather, running over some half dozen of the inhabited cells below.  And along the whole length of it on either side, up to the height of the small round arched windows placed high up in the wall, were ranges of shelves occupied by many hundreds of volumes, all of the same size, and all bound alike in parchment, with two red bands of Russian leather running across the backs of them, and all lettered and dated in black ink, of gradually shaded degrees of fadedness.  The place looked like the archive-room of some public establishment, which kept its archives in very unusually good order.

All these were the documents and pleadings in all the lawsuits and other legal transactions of all the clients of the three generations of the Fortini.  And it would not have been too much to say, that Signor Giovacchino Fortini would have deemed the destruction of this mass of papers as a misfortune to be paralleled only by that of the Alexandrian library.

On the opposite side to the long gallery the anteroom gave access to a large and lofty vaulted chamber, about one-sixth part of the space of which—­that is, a third of the floor and a half of the height—­ was partitioned off by a slight modern wall and ceiling.  Two young clerks occupied the larger unenclosed portion of the large hall,—­ for such its size entitled it to be called,—­and Signor Fortini’s senior and confidential clerk sat on the top of the ceiling, which enclosed the smaller portion.  A small wooden stair gave access to this lofty position, which was admirably adapted for keeping an eye on the youngsters on the floor below.  Under the same ceiling, in the snug little room thus divided off, sat Signor Fortini himself.  And a very snug and bright-looking little room it was, with a pretty stone-mullioned three-lighted casement window opening to the south; and in the wall at right angles to it another window, offering accommodation of a much more unusual and peculiar kind.  It opened, in fact, into the transept of the cathedral, and had been intended to enable the occupier or occupiers of the apartment, now inhabited by the lawyer, to enjoy the benefit of attending mass without the trouble of descending into the church for that purpose.  If Signor Giovacchino Fortini did not often use it for that purpose, it, at all events, had the effect of imparting an ecclesiastical air to his habitat, which seemed to have a certain propriety in the case of a gentleman whose business connections with the hierarchy were so close, and unquestionably added to the savour of unimpeachable respectability which appertained to Signor Fortini and all belonging to him.