Corona is still beautiful, still dark, still magnificent, though she has reached the age beyond which no woman ever goes until after death.  There are few lines in the noble face and such as are there are not the scars of heart wounds.  Her life, too, has been peaceful and undisturbed by great events these many years.  There is, indeed, one perpetual anxiety in her existence, for the old prince is an aged man and she loves him dearly.  The tough strength must give way some day and there will be a great mourning in the house of Saracinesca, nor will any mourn the dead more sincerely than Corona.  And there is a shade of bitterness in the knowledge that her marvellous beauty is waning.  Can she be blamed for that?  She has been beautiful so long.  What woman who has been first for a quarter of a century can give up her place without a sigh?  But much has been given to her to soften the years of transition, and she knows that also, when she looks from her husband to her four boys.

Then, too, it seems more easy to grow old when she catches a glimpse from time to time of Donna Tullia Del Ferice, who wears her years ungracefully, and who was once so near to becoming Giovanni Saracinesca’s wife.  Donna Tullia is fat and fiery of complexion, uneasily vivacious and unsure of herself.  Her disagreeable blue eyes have not softened, nor has the metallic tone of her voice lost its sharpness.  Yet she should not be a disappointed woman, for Del Ferice is a power in the land, a member of parliament, a financier and a successful schemer, whose doors are besieged by parasites and his dinner-table by those who wear fine raiment and dwell in kings’ palaces.  Del Ferice is the central figure in the great building syndicates which in 1887 are at the height of their power.  He juggles with millions of money, with miles of real estate, with thousands of workmen.  He is director of a bank, president of a political club, chairman of half a dozen companies and a deputy in the chambers.  But his face is unnaturally pale, his body is over-corpulent, and he has trouble with his heart.  The Del Ferice couple are childless, to their own great satisfaction.

Anastase Gouache, the great painter, is also in Rome.  Sixteen years ago he married the love of his life, Faustina Montevarchi, in spite of the strong opposition of her family.  But times had changed.  A new law existed and the thrice repeated formal request for consent made by Faustina to her mother, freed her from parental authority and brotherly interference.  She and her husband passed through some very lean years in the beginning, but fortune has smiled upon them since that.  Anastase is very famous.  His character has changed little.  With the love of the ideal republic in his heart, he shed his blood at Mentana for the great conservative principle, he fired his last shot for the same cause at the Porta Pia on the twentieth of September 1870; a month later he was fighting for France under the gallant Charette—­whether