And in the midst of old and new, religious and pagan, priceless and insignificant, sat her Excellency, the ex-American beauty and present chatelaine of the great family of the princes of the Sansevero, in a golf skirt and walking boots, a plain starched shirtwaist and stock tie, adding to the wrinkles in her forehead and in the corners of her eyes by trying to figure out how, with forty thousand lire, she was going to pay a debt of sixty thousand lire and have enough left over to open the great palace in Rome, and realize a dream that had always been in her heart—­to take Nina out in Roman society, to give herself the delight of showing Rome to Nina, and the greater delight of showing Nina to Rome.

She glanced up at two photographs, the only ones on her desk.  The first was of her husband, taken in the fancy costume of a troubadour, with the signature “Sandro” across the lower half, in characters symbolical of the song he might have sung, so gay and ascending was the handwriting.  The other picture was of a young woman in evening dress.  The face was bright and winning rather than pretty; the personality really chic, and this in spite of the fact that the girl’s clothes were over-elaborate.  Her dress was a mass of embroidery, and around her throat she wore a diamond collar.  Diamond hairpins held the loops of waving fair hair—­very like the princess’s own—­and two handsome rings were on the fingers of one hand.  It in no way suggested the Italian idea of a young girl; yet there was a youthful freshness in the expression of the face, a girlish slimness of the figure that could not have been produced by touching up the negative.  Under the picture was written in a clear and modernly square handwriting, “To my own Auntie Princess with love from Nina.”

The name “Auntie Princess” carried as much of Nina’s personality to the mind of her aunt as the picture itself.  It was the one her childish lips had spoken when she was told that her aunt was to marry a prince.  Most distinct of all Eleanor Sansevero’s memories of home was one of Nina being held up high above the crowd at the end of the pier to blow good-by kisses to the bride of a foreign nobleman, being carried out into the river whose widening water was making actual the separation between herself and all that till then had been her life.

It was only for a little while, she had thought at the time.  She would go back once a year or so, surely; and Nina should come over often.  But in the intervening fifteen years, though the Randolphs had been in Europe many times, they had always chosen midsummer for their trip, and the princess had joined her sister at some northern city or watering-place.  This visit, therefore, was to be Nina’s first glimpse of her aunt’s home, and the princess was determined that she should not spend the time desolately in the country!  She might come here for a little while—­for reasons that the princess would have found hard to explain to herself, she did not want Nina to get a false impression.  Yet for nothing would she have exposed her husband’s failing—­even to her own family.  With the weakness of a true wife, she never dreamed that all her world suspected, if it did not actually know, of the great inroads on her fortune that his gambling had made.