Then he fumbled in his pockets again and found a photograph which he had also bought in the course of the day—­the photograph of Gouache’s latest portrait, obtained in a contraband fashion and with some difficulty from the photographer.

Without hesitation Spicca took a pocket-knife and began to cut the head out, with that extraordinary neatness and precision which characterised him when he used any sharp instrument.  The head just fitted the frame.  He fastened it in with drops of sealing-wax and carefully burned the rest of the picture in the embers.

The face of Maria Consuelo smiled at him in the lamplight, as he turned it in different ways so as to find the best aspect of it.  Then he hung it on a nail above the mantelpiece just under a pair of crossed foils.

“That man Gouache is a very clever fellow,” he said aloud.  “Between them, he and nature have made a good likeness.”

He sat down again and it was a long time before he made up his mind to take away the lamp and go to bed.

CHAPTER XIII.

Del Ferice kept his word and arranged matters for Orsino with a speed and skill which excited the latter’s admiration.  The affair was not indeed very complicated though it involved a deed of sale, the transfer of a mortgage and a deed of partnership between Orsino Saracinesca and Andrea Contini, architect, under the style “Andrea Contini and Company,” besides a contract between this firm of the one party and the bank in which Del Ferice was a director, of the other, the partners agreeing to continue the building of the half-finished house, and the bank binding itself to advance small sums up to a certain amount for current expenses of material and workmen’s wages.  Orsino signed everything required of him after reading the documents, and Andrea Contini followed his example.

The architect was a tall man with bright brown eyes, a dark and somewhat ragged beard, close cropped hair, a prominent, bony forehead and large, coarsely shaped, thin ears oddly set upon his head.  He habitually wore a dark overcoat, of which the collar was generally turned up on one side and not on the other.  Judging from the appearance of his strong shoes he had always been walking a long distance over bad roads, and when it had rained within the week his trousers were generally bespattered with mud to a considerable height above the heel.  He habitually carried an extinguished cigar between his teeth of which he chewed the thin black end uneasily.  Orsino fancied that he might be about eight and twenty years old, and was not altogether displeased with his appearance.  He was not at all like the majority of his kind, who, in Rome at least, usually affect a scrupulous dandyism of attire and an uncommon refinement of manner.  Whatever Contini’s faults might prove to be, Orsino did not believe that they would turn out to be those of idleness or vanity.  How far he was right in his judgment will appear before long, but he conceived his partner to be gifted, frank, enthusiastic and careless of outward forms.