In an apartment lighted by a row of three of these jealous apertures--one of the several distinct apartments into which the villa was divided and which were mainly occupied by foreigners of random race long resident in Florence--a gentleman was seated in company with a young girl and two good sisters from a religious house.

The room was, however, less sombre than our indications may have represented, for it had a wide, high door, which now stood open into the tangled garden behind; and the tall iron lattices admitted on occasion more than enough of the Italian sunshine.

It was moreover a seat of ease, indeed of luxury, telling of arrangements subtly studied and refinements frankly proclaimed, and containing a variety of those faded hangings of damask and tapestry, those chests and cabinets of carved and time-polished oak, those angular specimens of pictorial art in frames as pedantically primitive, those perverse-looking relics of medieval brass and pottery, of which Italy has long been the not quite exhausted storehouse.

These things kept terms with articles of modern furniture in which large allowance had been made for a lounging generation; it was to be noticed that all the chairs were deep and well padded and that much space was occupied by a writing-table of which the ingenious perfection bore the stamp of London and the nineteenth century.

There were books in profusion and magazines and newspapers, and a few small, odd, elaborate pictures, chiefly in water-colour.