“Jealous?  Of whom?” interrupted Hafner.  “It is not the first time I have heard the name of Boleslas uttered in connection with the Countess.  I confess I have never taken those words seriously, and I should not have thought that you, a frequenter of her salon, one of her friends, would hesitate on that subject.  Rest assured, Gorka is in love with his charming wife, and he could not make a better choice.  Countess Caterina is an excellent person, very Italian.  She is interested in him, as in you, as in Maitland, as in me; in you because you write such admirable books, in Maitland because he paints like our best masters, in Boleslas on account of the sorrow he had in the death of his first child, in me because I have so delicate a charge.  She is more than an excellent person, she is a truly superior woman, very superior.”  He uttered his hypocritical speech with such perfect ease that Dorsenne was surprised and irritated.  That Hafner did not believe one treacherous word of what he said the novelist was sure, he who, from the indiscreet confidences of Gorka, knew what to think of the Venetian’s manner, and he; too, understood the Baron’s glance!  At any other time he would have admired the policy of the old stager.  At that moment the novelist was vexed by it, for it caused him to play a role, very common but not very elevating, that of a calumniator, who has spoken ill of a woman with whom he dined the day before.  He, therefore, quickened his pace as much as politeness would permit, in order not to remain tete-a-tete with the Baron, and also to rejoin the persons of their party already arrived.

They emerged from the first room to enter a second, marked “Porcelain;” then a third, “Frescoes of Perino del Vaga,” on account of the ceiling upon which the master painted a companion to his vigorous piece at Genoa—­“Jupiter crushing the Giants”—­and, lastly, into a fourth, called “The Arazzi,” from the wonderful panels with which it was decorated.

A few visitors were lounging there, for the season was somewhat advanced, and the date which M. Ancona had chosen for the execution proved either the calculation of profound hatred or else the adroit ruse of a syndicate of retailers.  All the magnificent objects in the palace were adjudged at half the value they would have brought a few months sooner or later.  The small group of curios stood out in contrast to the profusion of furniture, materials, objects of art of all kinds, which filled the vast rooms.  It was the residence of five hundred years of power and of luxury, where masterpieces, worthy of the great Medicis, and executed in their time, alternated with the gewgaws of the eighteenth century and bronzes of the First Empire, with silver trinkets ordered but yesterday in London.  Baron Justus could not resist these.  He raised his glass and called Dorsenne to show him a curious armchair, the carving of a cartel, the embroidery on some material.  One glance sufficed for him to judge....  If the novelist had been capable of observing, he would have perceived in the detailed knowledge the banker had of the catalogue the trace of a study too deep not to accord with some mysterious project.