“Padrone,” he said, retiring backwards through the narrow door.  “A game of scopa to-day?”

“Have you the time to spare?” inquired the other, in a serious tone.  They always maintained the myth that Tiberio Colaisso was a very busy man.

“To-day,” answered the latter, without a smile, and emphasising the word as though it defined an exception, “to-day, I have nothing to do.  Besides, it is early.”

“We can play a hand and then we can dine at Cicco’s.”

“Being Friday in Advent, I had intended to fast,” replied the apothecary, who had not a penny in his pocket “But since you are so good as to invite me, I do not say no.”

Meschini said nothing, for he understood the situation, which was by no means a novel one.  His friend produced a pack of Italian cards, almost black with age.  He gave Meschini the only chair, and seated himself upon a three-legged stool.

It was a dismal scene.  The shop was like many of its kind in the poorer quarters of old Rome There was room for the counter and for three people to stand before it when the door was shut.  The floor was covered with a broken pavement of dingy bricks.  As the two men began to play a fine, drizzling rain wet the silent street outside, and the bricks within at once exhibited an unctuous moisture.  The sky had become cloudy after the fine morning, and there was little light in the shop.  Three of the walls were hidden by cases with glass doors, containing an assortment of majolica jars which would delight a modern amateur, but which looked dingy and mean in the poor shop.  Here and there, between them, stood bottles large and small, some broken and dusty, others filled with liquids and bearing paper labels, brown with age, the ink inscriptions fading into the dirty surface that surrounded them.  The only things in the place which looked tolerably clean were the little brass scales and the white marble tablet for compounding solid medicines.

The two men looked as though they belonged to the little room.  Meschini’s yellow complexion was as much in keeping with the surroundings as the chemist’s gray, colourless face.  His bloodshot eyes wandered from the half-defaced cards to the objects in the shop, and he was uncertain in his play.  His companion looked at him as though he were trying to solve some intricate problem that gave him trouble.  He himself was a man who, like the librarian, had begun life under favourable circumstances, had studied medicine and had practised it.  But he had been unfortunate, and, though talented, did not possess the qualifications most necessary for his profession.  He had busied himself with chemistry and had invented a universal panacea which had failed, and in which he had sunk most of his small capital.  Disgusted with his reverses he had gravitated slowly to his present position.  Finding him careless and indifferent to their wants, his customers had dropped away, one by one, until he earned barely enough to keep body