Even those comparatively few families who, like the Saracinesca, had scornfully declined to dabble in the whirlpool of affairs, did not by any means refuse to dance to the music of success which filled the city with, such enchanting strains.  The Princess Befana rose from her deathbed with more than usual vivacity and went to the length of opening her palace on two evenings in two successive weeks, to the intense delight of her gay and youthful heirs, who earnestly hoped that the excitement might kill her at last, and kill her beyond resurrection this time.  But they were disappointed.  She still dies periodically in winter and blooms out again in spring with the poppies, affording a perpetual and edifying illustration of the changes of the year, or, as some say, of the doctrine of immortality.  On one of those memorable occasions she walked through a quadrille with the aged Prince Saracinesca, whereupon Sant’ Ilario slipped his arm round Corona’s waist and waltzed with her down the whole length of the ballroom and back again amidst the applause of his contemporaries and their children.  If Orsino had had a wife he would have followed their example.  As it was, he looked rather gloomily in the direction of a silent and high-born damsel with whom he was condemned to dance the cotillon at a later hour.

So all went gaily on until Ash Wednesday extinguished the social flame, suddenly and beyond relighting.  And still Orsino did not meet Maria Consuelo, and still he hesitated to make another attempt to find her at home.  He began to wonder whether he should ever see her again, and as the days went by he almost wished that Donna Tullia would send him a card for her lenten evenings, at which Maria Consuelo regularly assisted as he learned from the papers.  After that first invitation to dinner, he had expected that Del Ferice’s wife would make an attempt to draw him into her circle; and, indeed, she would probably have done so had she followed her own instinct instead of submitting to the higher policy dictated by her husband.  Orsino waited in vain, not knowing whether to be annoyed at the lack of consideration bestowed upon him, or to admire the tact which assumed that he would never wish to enter the Del Ferice circle.

It is presumably clear that Orsino was not in love with Madame d’Aranjuez, and he himself appreciated the fact with a sense of disappointment.  He was amazed at his own coldness and at the indifference with which he had submitted to what amounted to a most abrupt dismissal.  He even went so far as to believe that Maria Consuelo had repulsed him designedly in the hope of kindling a more sincere passion.  In that case she had been egregiously mistaken, he thought.  He felt a curiosity to see her again before she left Rome, but it was nothing more than that.  A new and absorbing interest had taken possession of him which at first left little room in his nature for anything else.  His days were spent in the laborious study of figures and plans, broken