Lisbeth, you know, is highly amused at it." Orlando again looked displeased, for when visitors were present he did not like his son to refer to the person whom he had just named.

Lisbeth Kauffmann, very blonde and pink and merry, was barely thirty years of age, and belonged to the Roman foreign colony.

For two years past she had been a widow, her husband having died at Rome whither he had come to nurse a complaint of the lungs.

Thenceforward free, and sufficiently well off, she had remained in the city by taste, having a marked predilection for art, and painting a little, herself.

In the Via Principe Amadeo, in the new Viminal district, she had purchased a little palazzo, and transformed a large apartment on its second floor into a studio hung with old stuffs, and balmy in every season with the scent of flowers.