They had long since passed through the Porta San Giovanni and had arrived at the Coliseum.  Scorpa gave Sansevero little chance to answer, but with a friendly good-by, he turned toward the Monte Quirinal.  Sansevero pursued his way along the foot of the Palatine.  He was disturbed; but he could not bring himself to read into the duke’s words a covert threat.  His first impulse was to repeat the conversation to Eleanor, but he knew how the mere suspicion that Scorpa had detected her false stones had worried her.  Curiously enough, in Sansevero’s mind the larger issue of the picture was quite overlooked in the more immediate consideration of the jewels.  By the time he reached home he had decided to wait until further events should show Scorpa’s intentions.  And until then he would say nothing to any one—­least of all to Eleanor.

In the meantime Nina was galloping across the Campagna.  For a while the fear of Scorpa remained, but when she realized that he was no longer with the hunt, she breathed more freely, and again began to enjoy the day.  It was almost as though she were riding through the country at home.  She might have been hunting in Westchester, or on Long Island, for any actual difference that there was, and the finish, as at home, was merely anise seed, and the hounds were fed raw meat.

CHAPTER XVII

NINA DUSTS BEHIND THE COUNTER

Kate Titherington, daughter of Alonzo K. Titherington, the Pittsburg iron magnate, had some six years before married the Count Masco.  After a short experience of living in his ancestral palace, they had moved into an apartment out in the new part of the city; very handsome, very luxurious and modern in every way.  “Deliver me from these musty old dungeons!” she had exclaimed to her husband.  “I will give a free deed of gift to the rats, who are really, my dear, the only beings I can think of to whom this tumbledown barracks of yours would be comfortable.”  Her husband was a meek and inoffensive appendage, who had been well brought up by an overbearing mother and turned over, perfectly trained, to the strenuous requirements of the bonny Kate.

The vivid Countess Masco, nee Titherington, was looked upon with disfavor by the more conservative Romans, and her position was rather, one might say, on the outer edge of the inner circle.  There were those who liked her, and who found her amusing and lively; indeed, that was the trouble—­it was her liveliness that had banished her to the outer edge, instead of making a place for her in the inmost circle, where Eleanor Sansevero, for instance, was so securely established.

Nina had known Kate Titherington one summer at Bar Harbor, but her first encounter with this flamboyant personality in Italy was at the Grand Hotel a few days before the hunt.  Nina was serving at one of the tables of a charity tea, when she saw a very highly-colored, plump figure, with draperies in full sail, bearing down upon her from the top of the wide steps, at the back of the big red hall.  The red of the hall paled beside the cerise costume of the approaching lady.  In a voice loud and high-keyed, yet not unmusical, she cried: