how.  The young widow came back to Rome, to her father, and here shortly afterwards, in the shadow of Saint Peter’s, her little girl was born.  It might have been supposed that Mrs. Light would marry again, and I know she had opportunities.  But she overreached herself.  She would take nothing less than a title and a fortune, and they were not forthcoming.  She was admired and very fond of admiration; very vain, very worldly, very silly.  She remained a pretty widow, with a surprising variety of bonnets and a dozen men always in her train.  Giacosa dates from this period.  He calls himself a Roman, but I have an impression he came up from Ancona with her.  He was l’ami de la maison.  He used to hold her bouquets, clean her gloves (I was told), run her errands, get her opera-boxes, and fight her battles with the shopkeepers.  For this he needed courage, for she was smothered in debt.  She at last left Rome to escape her creditors.  Many of them must remember her still, but she seems now to have money to satisfy them.  She left her poor old father here alone—­helpless, infirm and unable to work.  A subscription was shortly afterwards taken up among the foreigners, and he was sent back to America, where, as I afterwards heard, he died in some sort of asylum.  From time to time, for several years, I heard vaguely of Mrs. Light as a wandering beauty at French and German watering-places.  Once came a rumor that she was going to make a grand marriage in England; then we heard that the gentleman had thought better of it and left her to keep afloat as she could.  She was a terribly scatter-brained creature.  She pretends to be a great lady, but I consider that old Filomena, my washer-woman, is in essentials a greater one.  But certainly, after all, she has been fortunate.  She embarked at last on a lawsuit about some property, with her husband’s family, and went to America to attend to it.  She came back triumphant, with a long purse.  She reappeared in Italy, and established herself for a while in Venice.  Then she came to Florence, where she spent a couple of years and where I saw her.  Last year she passed down to Naples, which I should have said was just the place for her, and this winter she has laid siege to Rome.  She seems very prosperous.  She has taken a floor in the Palazzo F——­, she keeps her carriage, and Christina and she, between them, must have a pretty milliner’s bill.  Giacosa has turned up again, looking as if he had been kept on ice at Ancona, for her return.”

“What sort of education,” Rowland asked, “do you imagine the mother’s adventures to have been for the daughter?”

“A strange school!  But Mrs. Light told me, in Florence, that she had given her child the education of a princess.  In other words, I suppose, she speaks three or four languages, and has read several hundred French novels.  Christina, I suspect, is very clever.  When I saw her, I was amazed at her beauty, and, certainly, if there is any truth in faces, she ought to have the soul of an angel.