Florian Varillo.  That such a fair, proud creature so splendidly endowed, could consent to unite herself to a man so vastly inferior, was an interesting puzzle to him.  He had met Varillo by chance in Naples one winter before he ever saw Angela, and knew that half his claim to the notice of the social world there was the fact of his betrothal to the famous “Sovrani.”  And moved by a strange desire to follow out this romance, and also because he was completing his studies of the Roman Church viewed as a “moral support to the education and elevation of man,” he, after leaving Paris, and paying a brief visit to Florence on a matter of business which could not be attended to otherwise than personally, went on as though drawn by some invisible magnet to Rome.  He had only been twenty-four hours in the city, when chance had led him under the balcony where the sculptured angels fronted the moon, and from whence the sweet voice of Sylvie Hermenstein had floated towards him with the words,—­

“Ti voglio ben assai, E tu non pensi a me.”

And he who had faced crowds without a tremor, and had flung thunderbolts of splendid defiance at shams, with the manner of a young Ajax defying the lightning, now found himself strangely put out and disturbed in his usual composure by the innocent aspect, and harmless perfume of a rose,—­a mere little pink petalled thing, with not even a thorn on its polished green stalk!  He had placed it in a glass of water on his writing table, and his eyes rested upon it the morning after he had received it with almost a reproachful air.  What was its golden-hearted secret?  Why, when he studied it, did he see the soft hue of a fair cheek, the flash of a bright eye, the drooping wave of a golden web of hair, the dainty curve of a white arm on which the sparkle of diamonds gleamed?  How was it that he managed to perceive all this in the leaves of a rose?  He could not tell; and he was angry with himself for his inability to explain the puzzle.  He reminded himself that he had business in Rome—­ “business,” he repeated sternly to his own conscience,—­the chief part of which was to ascertain from some one of the leading spirits at the Vatican the view taken by the Papacy of the Ritualistic movement in England.

“If you can gauge correctly the real feeling, and render it in plain terms, apart from all conventional or social considerations,” wrote his publisher in a letter which had just reached him—­“that is, if you dare to do so much—­and I think you will scarcely hesitate—­you will undoubtedly give great and lasting help to Christian England.”  As he read this over for the second or third time he remembered that he had an appointment with a certain powerful personage, known as Monsignor Gherardi, that morning at eleven.