* * * * *

“Don’t, please, let that woman take you anywhere—­to see anything!” said Kitty, with energy, to her companion, as they walked through the rooms of the mezzanino.

Lord Magellan laughed.  “What’s the matter with her?”

“Oh, nothing!” said Kitty, impatiently, “except that she’s wicked—­and common—­and a snake—­and your mother would have a fit if she knew you had anything to do with her.”

The red-haired youth looked grave.

“Thank you, Lady Kitty,” he said, quietly.  “I’ll take your advice.”

“Oh, I say, what a nice boy you are!” cried Kitty, impulsively, laying a hand a moment on his shoulder.  And then, as though his filial instinct had awakened hers, she added, with hasty falsehood:  “Maman, of course, knows nothing about her.  That was just bluff what she said.  But Donna Laura oughtn’t to ask such people.  There—­that’s the way.”

And she pointed to a small staircase in the wall, whereof the trap-door at the top was open.  They climbed it, and found themselves at once in one of the great rooms of the piano nobile, to which this quick and easy access from the inhabited entresol had been but recently contrived.

“What a marvellous place!” cried Lord Magellan, looking round him.

They were in the principal apartment of the famous Vercelli palace, a legacy from one of those classical architects whose work may be seen in the late seventeenth-century buildings of Venice.  The rooms, enormously high, panelled here and there in tattered velvets and brocades, or frescoed in fast-fading scenes of old Venetian life, stretched in bewildering succession on either side of a central passage or broad corridor, all of them leading at last on the northern side to a vast hall painted in architectural perspective by the pupils of Tiepolo, and overarched by a ceiling in which the master himself had massed a multitude of forms equal to Rubens in variety and facility of design, expressed in a thin trenchancy of style.  Figures recalling the ancient triumphs and possessions of Venice, in days when she sat dishonored and despoiled, crowded the coved roof, the painted cornices and pediments.  Gayly colored birds hovered in blue skies; philosophers and poets in grisaille made a strange background for large-limbed beauties couched on roses, or young warriors amid trophies of shining arms; and while all this garrulous commonplace lived and breathed above, the walls below, cold in color and academic in treatment, maintained as best they could the dignity of the vast place, thus given up to one of the greatest of artists and emptiest of minds.

On the floor of this magnificent hall stood a few old and broken chairs.  But the candelabra of glass and ormolu, hanging from the ceiling, were very nearly of the date of the palace, and superb.  Meanwhile, through a faded taffeta of a golden-brown shade, the afternoon light from the high windows to the southwest poured into the stately room.