Even that generous temptation was gone now.  The house having collapsed, its members appeared to him only in their true natures, a good-for-nothing young man, tainted with a mortal disease, a foolish mother, a devout spinster threatened with religious mania, and the last descendant of the great old race, one little girl-child not likely to live, and perhaps better dead.  In their several ways they had treated him as the contemptible instrument of their inclinations; they were gone from his life and he was glad of it, when he thought of each one separately.  Yet, collectively, he wished them all in the palace again, even a month ago, even on the day before the exodus; good, bad, indifferent, no matter what, they had been Casa Conti still, to the end, the family he had served faithfully, honestly and hopelessly for upwards of a third of a century.  That might seem to be inconsistent, but it was the only consistency he had ever known, and it was loyalty, of a kind.

But there was one whom he wished back for her own sake; there was Donna Sabina.  When he thought of her, his hands fell from his head at last, and folded themselves over the scrawled figures on the big sheet of paper, and he looked long and steadily at them, without seeing them at all.

He wondered what would become of her.  He had seen her on the last day and he should never forget it.  Before going away with the Baroness Volterra she had found her way to his dark office, and had stood a few moments before the shabby old table, with a small package in her hand.  He could see the slight figure still, when he closed his eyes, and her misty hair against the cold light of the window.  She had come to ask him if he would bury her dead canary, somewhere under the sky where there was grass and it would not be disturbed.  Where could she bury it, down in the heart of Rome?  She had wrapped it in a bit of pink satin and had laid it in a little brown cardboard box which had been full of chocolates from Ronzi and Singer’s in Piazza Colonna.  She pushed back the lid a finger’s breadth and he saw the pink satin for a second.  She laid the box before him.  Would he please do what she asked?  Very timidly she slipped a simple little ring off her finger, one of those gold ones with the sacred monogram which foreigners insist upon calling “Pax.”  She said she had bought it with her own money, and could give it away.  She wished to give it to him.  He protested, refused, but the fathomless violet eyes gazed into his very reproachfully.  He had always been so kind to her, she said; would he not keep the little ring to remember her by?

So he had taken it, and that same day he had gone all the way to his lonely vineyard on Monte Mario carrying the chocolate box in his hands, and he had buried it under the chestnut-tree at the upper end, where there was some grass; and the breeze always blew there on summer afternoons.  Then he had sat on the roots of the tree for a while, looking towards Rome.