“Eh?  You’re right.  Everything is heard here.  But who’s to pay for my mourning the saints alone know!  I sent an express this morning to my father, but you know my brothers bleed him like leeches.  I could have got this easily enough from the Duke a year ago—­it’s his marriage has made him so stiff.  That little white-faced fool—­she hates me because Lelio won’t look at her, and she thinks it’s my fault.  As if I cared whom he looks at!  Sometimes I think he has money put away...all I want is two hundred ducats...a woman of my rank!” She turned suddenly on Odo, who stood, very small and frightened, in the corner to which she had pushed him.  “What are you staring at, child?  Eh! the monkey is dropping with sleep.  Look at his eyes, abate!  Here, Vanna, Tonina, to bed with him; he may sleep with you in my dressing-closet, Tonina.  Go with her, child, go; but for God’s sake wake him if he snores.  I’m too ill to have my rest disturbed.”  And she lifted a pomander to her nostrils.

The next few days dwelt in Odo’s memory as a blur of strange sights and sounds.  The super-acute state of his perceptions was succeeded after a night’s sleep by the natural passivity with which children accept the improbable, so that he passed from one novel impression to another as easily and with the same exhilaration as if he had been listening to a fairy tale.  Solitude and neglect had no surprises for him, and it seemed natural enough that his mother and her maids should be too busy to remember his presence.

For the first day or two he sat unnoticed on his little stool in a corner of his mother’s room, while packing-chests were dragged in, wardrobes emptied, mantua-makers and milliners consulted, and troublesome creditors dismissed with abuse, or even blows, by the servants lounging in the ante-chamber.  Donna Laura continued to show the liveliest symptoms of concern, but the child perceived her distress to be but indirectly connected with the loss she had suffered, and he had seen enough of poverty at the farm to guess that the need of money was somehow at the bottom of her troubles.  How any one could be in want, who slept between damask curtains and lived on sweet cakes and chocolate, it exceeded his fancy to conceive; yet there were times when his mother’s voice had the same frightened angry sound as Filomena’s on the days when the bailiff went over the accounts at Pontesordo.

Her excellency’s rooms, during these days, were always crowded, for besides the dressmakers and other merchants there was the hairdresser, or French Monsu—­a loud, important figure, with a bag full of cosmetics and curling-irons—­the abate, always running in and out with messages and letters, and taking no more notice of Odo than if he had never seen him, and a succession of ladies brimming with condolences, and each followed by a servant who swelled the noisy crowd of card-playing lacqueys in the ante-chamber.