It is extremely healthy, however, and altogether one of the pleasantest towns in Italy to live in.  It has, too, one of the fairest gardens in Europe:  the Valentino, with its old red-brick palace, its elms, its lawns, its river and setting, on one side, of lovely hills.  Lady Mary W. Montagu speaks of the beauty of this garden in her day.  I think she would scarcely recognise it at the present.  Modern art has done its best, and over the whole yet lingers the mysterious charm of the Past; the dark historical legends connected with the palace and its quondam frail, fair, and, I regret to add, ferocious mistress, its—­But what has all this to do with “Saint or Satan,” you will ask?  Where is your promised story?

Well, Satan enters somewhat largely into the story of the Valentino which I will relate you at some future time; and, as to the part, if any, his dark Majesty had in what I am going to tell you to-day, you yourself must judge, reader.  I am inclined to think he had a claw in the matter, rather than Saint Antonio to whom the miracle is ascribed.  The miracle!  Yes, the miracle.  And if you could see her, you would certainly say that a miracle of some kind there certainly was.

I have, after long consideration and study, come to the conclusion that “Old Maids” are, generally speaking, a very pleasant, kind-hearted portion of society.  They may be a little irritable and restive while standing upon the border-land that divides the marriageable from the un-marriageable age; but that boundary once passed, they take place among the worthiest and best.  And surely their anxiety as to the reply to the question of “Miss or Mrs.?” is pardonable.  Matrimony means an utter change of life to a woman; while to a man it is of infinitely less import.

I am afraid I cannot class the “Signorina Guiseppina Pace” as having formed one of the pleasant section of old maids; I must even, however reluctantly, place her among the decidedly unpleasant ones.  “Peace”—­“Pace” was her name, but her old mother, with whom she lived, would have told you that she differed greatly from her name.

So do most of us, indeed; and I am sure you have only to run over the list of your friends in the kindliest manner to see that I am right in my affirmation.

Perhaps Miss Guiseppina thought that one can have too much of even a good thing; that the name of Pace was quite enough for the house, and that, in consequence, she ought to do her best to banish it under all other circumstances.  She certainly succeeded; for she led her poor old widow-mother and their single servant such a life as to give them a lively foretaste of what Purgatory—­to say no worse—­might possibly be.

Ah! if she could but have cut off the Pace from her own name as cleanly as she cut off all possible peace from the two poor women who were doomed, for their sins, to live under the same roof with her!

But, despite the endeavours during thirty odd long years, she had never had one single chance of doing so; and it riled her to the core.  Schoolfellows had floated away upon the sea of matrimony, friends had become mothers—­grandmothers—­and yet she remained Guiseppina Pace, as she ever had remained; and with no prospect of a change.