“Now, Enrica,” and the cavaliere turned and took her arm, “come in and give me some breakfast.  An old man of eighty must eat, if he means to dance at weddings.”

“You, Nobili, must come with me,” said Fra Pacifico, laying his hand on the count’s shoulder.  “We will wait the cavaliere’s summons to return here over a bottle of the marchesa’s best vintage, and a cutlet cooked by Maria.  She is my best cook; I have one for every day in the week.”

So they parted—­Trenta with Enrica descending flight after flight of steps, leading from terrace to terrace, down to the villa; Nobili mounting upward to the forest with Fra Pacifico toward Corellia, to await the marchesa’s answer.

CHAPTER VI.

THE CONTRACT.

Fra Pacifico, with Adamo and Pipa, had labored ever since-daybreak to arrange the rooms at the villa before the marchesa rose.  Pipa had freely used the broom and many pails of water.  All the windows were thrown open, and clouds of invisible incense from the flowers without sweetened the fusty rooms.

The villa had not been inhabited for nearly fifty years.  It was scantily provided with furniture, but there were chairs and tables and beds, and all the rough necessaries of life.  To make all straight, whole generations of beetles had been swept away; and patriarchal spiders, which clung tenaciously to the damp spots on the walls.  A scorpion or two had been found, which, firmly resisting to quit the chinks where they had grown and multiplied, had died by decapitation.  Fra Pacifico would not have owned it, but he had discovered and killed a nest of black adders that lay concealed, curled up in a curtain.

He had with his own hands, in the early morning, carefully fashioned the spacious sala on the ground-floor to the marchesa’s liking.  A huge sofa, with a faded amber cover, had been drawn out of a recess, and so placed that the light should fall at her back.—­She objected to the sunshine, with true Italian perverseness.  Some arm-chairs, once gilt, and still bearing a coronet, were placed in a semicircle opposite.  The windows of the sala, and two glass doors of the same size and make, looked east and west; toward the terraces and the garden on one side, and over the cliffs and the chasm to the opposite mountains on the other.  The walls were broken by doors of varnished pine-wood.  These doors led, on the right, to the chapel, Enrica’s bedroom, and many empty apartments; on the left, to the marchesa’s suite of rooms, the offices, and the stone corridor which communicated with the now ruined tower.  High up on the walls of the sala, two large and roughly-painted frescoes decorated the empty spaces.  A Dutch seaport on one side, with sloping roofs and tall gables, bordering a broad river, upon which ships sailed vaguely away into a yellow haze. (Not more vaguely sailing, perhaps, than many human ships, with life-sails set to catch the wind of fortune—­ships which never make more way than these painted emblems!) Opposite, a hunting-party of the olden time picnicked in a forest-glade; a brown and red palace in the background, in front lords and ladies lounging on the grass—­bundles of satin, velvet, powder, ribbons, feathers, shoulder-knots, ruffles, long-tailed coats, and trains.