The Count was a member of an ancient Tuscan family, but of such small estate that he had been glad to accept Amy Osmond, in spite of the questionable beauty which had yet not hampered her career, with the modest dowry her mother was able to offer--a sum about equivalent to that which had already formed her brother's share of their patrimony.

Count Gemini since then, however, had inherited money, and now they were well enough off, as Italians went, though Amy was horribly extravagant.

The Count was a low-lived brute; he had given his wife every pretext.

She had no children; she had lost three within a year of their birth.

Her mother, who had bristled with pretensions to elegant learning and published descriptive poems and corresponded on Italian subjects with the English weekly journals, her mother had died three years after the Countess's marriage, the father, lost in the grey American dawn of the situation, but reputed originally rich and wild, having died much earlier.