The place was unchanged, and the dancing cherubs on the great chairs seemed to welcome daylight after their long darkness.

The visitor wandered slowly from end to end of the chamber, nodded to himself, and became animated.  Then he checked his gathering excitement, and presently spoke.

“I think I am going to help you, Sir Walter,” he said.

“That is great and good news, signor.”

Then the old man became inconsequent, and turned from the room to the contents.  If, indeed, he had found a clue, he appeared in no haste to pursue it.  He entered now upon a disquisition concerning the furniture, and they listened patiently, for he had showed that any interruption troubled him.  But it seemed that he enjoyed putting a strain upon their impatience.

“Beautiful pieces,” he said, “but not Spanish, as you led me to suppose.  Spanish chestnut wood, but nothing else Spanish about them.  They are of the Italian Renaissance, and it is most seemly that Italian craftsmanship of such high order should repose here, under an Italian ceiling.  Strange to say, my sleeping apartment at Rome closely resembles this room.  I live in a villa that dates from the fifteenth century, and belonged to the Colonna.  My chests are more superb than these; but your suite—­the bed and chairs—­I confess are better than mine.  There is, however, a reason for that.  Let us examine them for the sake of Mrs. May.  Are these carved chairs, with their reliefs of dancing putti, familiar to her—­the figures, I mean?”

Mary shook her head.

“Then it is certain that in your Italian wanderings you did not go to Prato.  These groups of children dancing and blowing horns are very cleverly copied from Donatello’s famous pulpit in the duomo.  The design is carried on from the chairs to the footboard of the bed; but in their midst upon the footboard is let in this oval, easel-picture, painted on wood.  It is faded, and the garlands have withered in so many hundred years, as well they might; but I can feel the dead color quite well, and I also know who painted it.”

“Is it possible, signor—­this faint ghost of a picture?”

“There exists no doubt at all.  You see a little Pinturicchio.  Note the gay bands of variegated patterns, the arabesques and fruits.  Their hues have vanished, but their forms and certain mannerisms of the master are unmistakable.  These dainty decorations were the sign manual of such quattrocento painters as Gozzoli and Pinturicchio; and to these men he, for whom these works of art were created, assigned the painting and adornment of the Vatican.  We will come to him directly.  It was for Michelangelo to make the creations of these artists mere colored bubbles and froth, when seen against the immensity and intellectual grandeur of his future masterpieces in the Sistine.  But that was afterwards.  We are concerned with the Pope for whom these chairs and this bed were made.  Yes, a Pope, my friends—­no less a personage than Alexander VI.!”