large companies of regular guests who have eaten their meals there during most of their lives.  But there is much more room in the house than appears.  The vast kitchen on the ground floor terminates in a large space, heavily vaulted and lighted by oil lamps, where rougher tables are set and spread, and where you may see the well-to-do wine-carter eating his supper after his journey across the Campagna, in company with some of his city acquaintances of a similar class.  In dark corners huge wine-casks present their round dusty faces to the doubtful light, the smell of the kitchen pervades everything, tempered by the smell of wine from the neighbouring cellars; the floor is of rough stone worn by generations of cooks, potboys, and guests.  Beyond this again a short flight of steps leads to a narrow doorway, passing through which one enters the last and most retired chamber of the huge inn.  Here there is barely room for a dozen persons, and when all the places are full the bottles and dishes are passed from the door by the guests themselves over each other’s heads, for there is no room to move about in the narrow space.  The walls are whitewashed and the tables are as plain as the chairs, but the food and drink that are consumed there are the best that the house affords, and the society, from the point of view of Marzio Pandolfi and his friends, is of the most agreeable.

The chiseller took his favourite seat in the corner furthest from the window.  Two or three men of widely different types were already at the table, and Marzio exchanged a friendly nod with each.  One was a florid man of large proportions, dressed in the height of the fashion and with scrupulous neatness.  He was a jeweller.  Another, a lawyer with a keen and anxious face, wore a tightly-buttoned frock coat and a black tie.  Immense starched cuffs covered his bony hands and part of his fingers.  He was supping on a salad, into which he from time to time poured an additional dose of vinegar.  A third man, with a round hat on one side of his head, and who wore a very light-coloured overcoat, displaying a purple scarf with a showy pin at the neck, held a newspaper in one hand and a fork in the other, with which he slowly ate mouthfuls of a ragout of wild boar.  He was a journalist on the staff of an advanced radical paper.

“Halloa, Sor Marzio!” cried this last guest, suddenly looking up from the sheet he was reading, “here is news of your brother.”

“What?” asked Marzio briefly, but as though the matter were utterly indifferent to him.  “Has he killed anybody, the assassin?” The journalist laughed hoarsely at the jest.

“Not so bad as that,” he answered.  “He is getting advancement.  They are going to make him a canon of Santa Maria Maggiore.  It is in the Osservatore Romano of this evening.”

“He is good for nothing else,” growled Marzio.  “It is just like him not to have told me anything about it.”

“With the sympathy which exists between you, I am surprised,” said the journalist.  “After all, you might convert him, and then he would be useful.  He will be an archdeacon next, and then a bishop—­who knows?—­perhaps a cardinal!”