So again the Princess Sansevero sat up in bed.  Her maid placed the coffee tray before her, and wrapped her quickly in the dressing-gown.  The plain woolen wrapper had looked ugly enough in the maid’s hands, but its drab color and fox fur so toned in with the red-gold hair and creamy skin of its wearer that an artist, could he have beheld the picture, would have been filled with delight.  It would not in the least have mattered to him that there was a chip in the cup into which she poured her coffee, nor that the linen napkin was darned in three places.  The silver breakfast service belonged to a time when such things were chiseled only for great personages and by master craftsmen.  That it was battered through several centuries of constant handling rather enhanced than diminished its value.  Of the same antiquity was the bed—­seven feet wide, its four posts elaborately carved with fruits and flowers, and with cupids grouped in the corners of the framework supporting a dome of crimson damask that matched the hangings.  What difference could it make to the artist that the springless mattress was as hard as a rock, and lumpy as a ploughed field?  With painted walls and vaulted ceilings that were the apotheosis of luxury, what did it matter that the raw chill from their stone surface penetrated to the very marrow of her Exalted Excellency’s bones?  Unfortunately, however, it was she who had to occupy the apartment and to her it did matter very much, for her American blood never had grown used to the chill of unheated rooms.

“I think I can heat the bathroom sufficiently for Excellency’s bath,” ventured the maid.

The princess shivered at the mere suggestion.  She knew only too well the feeling of the water in a room that was like an unheated cellar in the rainy season of late autumn.  “No, no!” she exclaimed, “fill me the little tub, in my sitting-room.”

[Illustration:  “AS SHE SPOKE, A DOOR OPENED OPPOSITE THE ONE THROUGH WHICH THE MAID HAD ENTERED, AND THE PRINCE CAME IN”]

As she spoke, a door opened opposite the one through which the maid had entered, and the prince came in.  A fresh color glowed under his olive skin, his hair was brushed until it was as polished as his nails; also he was shaved, but here his toilet for the day ended.  The open “V” of his dressing-gown (his was made of a costly material, quite in contrast to the one his wife wore) showed his throat; bare ankles were visible above his slippers.  With the raillery of a boy he cried: 

“Can it really be possible that you are cold!  No wonder they call yours the nation of ice water!  I know that is what you have in your veins!” With a spring he threw himself full length across the bed.

“Sandro, be careful!  See what you are doing!  You have spilled the coffee.”

“Oh, that’s nothing!” he said gaily; “it will wash out.”

“On the contrary, it is a great deal.  It makes unnecessary laundry and uses up the linen—­we can’t get any more, you know.”