Many years earlier Giovanni had expressed his convictions in regard to the change of order then imminent.  He had said that he would fight as long as there was anything to fight for, but that if the change came he would make the best of it.  He was now keeping his word.  He had fought as far as fighting had been possible and had sincerely wished that his warlike career might have offered more excitement and opportunity for personal distinction than had been afforded him in spending an afternoon on horseback, listening to the singing of bullets overhead.  His amateur soldiering was over long ago, but he was strong, brave and intelligent, and if he had been convinced that a second and more radical revolution could accomplish any good result, he would have been capable of devoting himself to its cause with a single-heartedness not usual in these days.  But he was not convinced.  He therefore lived a quiet life, making the best of the present, improving his lands and doing his best to bring up his sons in such a way as to give them a chance of success when the struggle should come.  Orsino was his eldest born and the results of modern education became apparent in him first, as was inevitable.

Orsino was at this time not quite twenty-one years of age, but the important day was not far distant and in order to leave a lasting memorial of the attaining of his majority Prince Saracinesca had decreed that Corona should receive a portrait of her eldest son executed by the celebrated Anastase Gouache.  To this end the young man spent three mornings in every week in the artist’s palatial studio, a place about as different from the latter’s first den in the Via San Basilio as the Basilica of Saint Peter is different from a roadside chapel in the Abruzzi.  Those who have seen the successful painter of the nineteenth century in his glory will have less difficulty in imagining the scene of Gouache’s labours than the writer finds in describing it.  The workroom is a hall, the ceiling is a vault thirty feet high, the pavement is of polished marble; the light enters by north windows which would not look small in a good-sized church, the doors would admit a carriage and pair, the tapestries upon the walls would cover the front of a modern house.  Everything is on a grand scale, of the best period, of the most genuine description.  Three or four originals of great masters, of Titian, of Reubens, of Van Dyck, stand on huge easels in the most favourable lights.  Some scores of matchless antique fragments, both of bronze and marble, are placed here and there upon superb carved tables and shelves of the sixteenth century.  The only reproduction visible in the place is a very perfect cast of the Hermes of Olympia.  The carpets are all of Shiraz, Sinna, Gjordez or old Baku—­no common thing of Smyrna, no unclean aniline production of Russo-Asiatic commerce disturbs the universal harmony.  In a full light upon the wall hangs a single silk carpet of wonderful tints,