and too dark for the face, though they were so well placed as to greatly improve the defect of the close-set eyes.  There was a marvellous genuine freshness of colour in the clear complexion, and the woman carried her head well upon a really magnificent neck.  She was strong and vital and healthy, and her personality was as distinctly dominating as her physical self.  Yet she was generally very careful not to displease her husband, even when he was capricious, and Veronica was sometimes surprised by the apparent weakness with which she yielded to him in matters about which she had as good a right as he to an opinion and a decision.  The girl supposed that her aunt was not so strong as she seemed to be, when actually brought face to face with the rough ice of Gregorio Macomer’s character.

Veronica made her observations discreetly and kept them to herself, as was not only becoming but wise.  At first the change from the semi-cloistered existence of the convent in Rome to the life at the Palazzo Macomer had dazzled the girl and had confused her ideas.  But with the natural desire of the very young to seem experienced, she had begun by manifesting no surprise at anything she saw; and she had soon discovered that, although she was supposed to be living in the society of the most idle and pleasure-loving city in the world, her surroundings were in reality neither gay nor dazzling, but decidedly monotonous and dull.  She had dim, childish memories of magnificent things in her father’s house, though the main impression was that of his death, following closely, as she had been told, upon her mother’s.  Of the latter, she could remember nothing.  In dreams she saw beautiful things, and brilliant light and splendid pictures and enchanted gardens, and when she awoke she felt that the dreams had been recollections of what she had seen, and of what still belonged to her.  But she sought the reality in vain.  The grand old palace in the Toledo was hers, she was told, but it was let for a term of years to the municipality and was filled with public offices; the marble staircases were black and dingy with the passing of many feet that tracked in the mud in winter and the filthy dust of Naples in summer.  Dark, poor faces and ill-clad forms moved through the halls, and horrible voices echoed perpetually in the corridors, where those who waited discussed taxes, and wrangled, and cursed those in power, and cheated one another, and picked a pocket now and then, and spat upon the marble pavement whereon royal and lordly feet had so often trod in days gone by.  It had all become a great nest of dirt and stealing and busy chicanery, where dingy, hawk-eyed men with sodden white faces and disgusting hands lay in wait for the unwary who had business with the city government, to rob them on pretence of facilitating their affairs, to cringe for a little coin flung them in scorn sometimes by one who had grown rich in greater robbery than they could practise—­sometimes, too, springing aside to escape a kick or a blow as ill-tempered success went swinging by, high-handed and vulgarly cruel, a few degrees less filthy and ten thousand times more repulsive.