high up, cut in the thickness of the wall.  Some tall, high-backed chairs, covered with strips of faded satin, stand near the chimney.  A wooden bedstead, without curtains, is partly concealed behind a painted screen, covered with gods and goddesses, much consumed and discolored from the damp.  As the room had felt a little chilly from want of use, a large fire of unbarked wood had been kindled.  The fire blazes fiercely on the flat stones within an open hearth, unguarded by a grate.

Having nodded to Silvestro, the marchesa takes no further notice of him.  From time to time she flings a loose paper from those lying before her—­over her shoulder toward the fire, which is at her back.  Of these papers some reach the fire; others, but half consumed, fall back upon the floor.  The flames of the wood-fire leap out and seize the papers—­now one by one—­now as they lie in little heaps.  The flames leap up; the burning papers crumple along the floor, in little streaks of fire, catching others that lie, still farther on in the room, still unconsumed.  Ere these papers have sunk into ashes, a fresh supply, thrown over her shoulder by the marchesa, have caught the flames.  All the space behind her chair is covered with smouldering papers.  A stack of wood, placed near to replenish the fire, has caught, and is smouldering also.  The fire, too, on the hearth is burning fiercely; it crackles up the wide open chimney in a mass of smoke and sparks.

The marchesa is far too much absorbed to notice this.  Silvestro, standing near the door—­the high desk and the marchesa’s tall figure between him and the hearth—­does not perceive it either.  Still the marchesa bends over her papers, reading some and throwing others over her shoulders into the flames behind.

Silvestro, who had grown hot and cold twenty times in a minute, standing before her, his book under his arm—­thinking she had forgotten him—­addresses her at last.

“How does madama feel?” Silvestro asks most humbly, turning his lack-lustre eyes upon her, “Well,” is the marchesa’s brief reply.  She signs to him to lay his book upon her desk.  She takes it in her hand.  She turns over the pages, following line after line with the tip of her long, white forefinger.

“There seems very little, Silvestro,” she says, running her eyes up and down each page as she turns it slowly over.  Her brow knits until her dark eyebrows almost meet—­“very little.  Has the corn brought in so small a sum, and the olives, and the grapes?”

“Madama,” begins Silvestro, and he bends his head and shoulders, and squeezes his skinny hands together, in a desperate effort to obliterate himself altogether, if possible, in the face of such mishaps—­“madama will condescend to remember the late spring frosts.  There is no corn anywhere.  Upon the lowlands the frost was most severe; in April, too, when the grain was forward.  The olives bore a little last season, but Corellia is a cold place—­too cold for olives; the trees, too, are very old.  This year there will be no crop at all.  As for the grapes—­”