He took a key from his pocket and thrust it into a hole in the boarding, which latter proved to be a rough door and opened noisily upon rusty hinges.  Orsino followed him in silence.  To the young man’s inexperienced eye the interior of the building was even more depressing than the outside.  It smelt like a vault, and a dim grey light entered the square apertures from the curtained scaffoldings without, just sufficient to help one to find a way through the heaps of rubbish that covered the unpaved floors.  Contini explained rapidly and concisely the arrangement of the rooms, calling one cave familiarly a dining-room and another a “conjugal bedroom,” as he expressed it, and expatiating upon the facilities of communication which he himself had carefully planned.  Orsino listened in silence and followed his guide patiently from place to place, in and out of dark passages and up flights of stairs as yet unguarded by any rail, until they emerged upon a sort of flat terrace intersected by low walls, which was indeed another floor and above which another story and a garret were yet to be built to complete the house.  Orsino looked gloomily about him, lighted a cigarette and sat down upon a bit of masonry.

“To me, it looks very like failure,” he remarked.  “But I suppose there is something in it.”

“It will not look like failure next month,” said Contini carelessly.  “Another story is soon built, and then the attic, and then, if you like, a Gothic roof and a turret at one corner.  That always attracts buyers first and respectable lodgers afterwards.”

“Let us have a turret, by all means,” answered Orsino, as though his tailor had proposed to put an extra button on the cuff of his coat.  “But how in the world are you going to begin?  Everything looks to me as though it were falling to pieces.”

“Leave all that to me, Signor Principe.  We will begin to-morrow.  I have a good overseer and there are plenty of workmen to be had.  We have material for a week at least, and paid for, excepting a few cartloads of lime.  Come again in ten days and you will see something worth looking at.”

“In ten days?  And what am I to do in the meantime?” asked Orsino, who fancied that he had found an occupation.

Andrea Contini looked at him in some surprise, not understanding in the least what he meant.

“I mean, am I to have nothing to do with the work?” asked Orsino.

“Oh—­as far as that goes, you will come every day, Signor Principe, if it amuses you, though as you are not a practical architect, your assistance is not needed until questions of taste have to be considered, such as the Gothic roof for instance.  But there are the accounts to be kept, of course, and there is the business with the bank from week to week, office work of various kinds.  That becomes naturally your department, as the practical superintendence of the building is mine, but you will of course leave it to the steward of the Signor Principe di Sant’ Ilario, who is a man of affairs.”