“I have forgotten the name of this palace,” he added, by way of a joke, meaning that he had not been called to do any work for a long time.  “Perhaps you can tell me what it is called.”

“It used to be a madhouse,” returned the porter in the same strain.  “Now that the madmen are gone, a mole lives here.  I kept the door open for the lunatics, and they all got out.  I keep it shut for the mole, when he does not shut it himself.”

“I will come in and smoke a pipe with you,” said Toto.  “We will talk of old times.”

The porter shook his head, and blocked the way.

“Not if you were the blessed soul of my father come back from the dead,” he said.  “The Baron’s instructions are to let no one in without the mole’s orders.”

“But I am an old friend,” objected Toto.

“Not if you were my mother, and the Holy Father, and Saint Peter, and all the souls of Purgatory at once,” answered the porter.

“May an apoplexy seize you!” observed Toto pleasantly, and he went off, his pipe in his mouth.

The porter shrugged his shoulders at the imprecation, shut the door reluctantly, and went in to supper.  Upstairs, Malipieri stood at his open window, smoking and watching the old fountain in the court.  It was evening, and a deep violet light filled the air and was reflected in the young man’s bronzed face.  He was very thoughtful now, and was not aware that he heard the irregular splash of the water in the dark basin at the feet of the statue of Hercules, and the eager little scream of the swallows as they shot past him, upward to the high old eaves, where their young were, and downwards almost to the gravel of the court, and in wide circles and madly sudden curves.  The violet light faded softly, and the dusk drank the last drop of it, and the last swallow disappeared under the eaves; but still Malipieri leaned upon the stone window-sill, looking down.

For a long time he thought of Signor Bruni.  He wondered whether he had ever seen the man before, or whether the face only seemed familiar because it was the type of a class of faces all more or less alike, all intensely respectable and not without refinement, expressing a grave reticence that did not agree with the fluent speech, and a polite reserve at odds with the inquisitive nature that revealed itself.

Malipieri was inclined to think he had never met Bruni, but somehow the latter recalled the hot times in Milan, and his short political career, and the association was not to the man’s advantage.  He could not recall the name at all.  It was like any other, and rather especially unobtrusive.  Anybody might be called Vittorio Bruni, and Vittorio Bruni might be anybody, from a senator to a shoemaker; but if he had been a senator, or any political personage, Malipieri would have heard of him.

There was something very odd, too, about his knowledge of Carthaginian antiquities, which was entirely limited to the contents of Malipieri’s own pamphlets.  He knew nothing of the Egyptians and very little about the Greeks, beyond what Malipieri had necessarily written about both.  He had talked much as a man does who has read up an unfamiliar subject in order to make a speech about it, and though the speech is skilful, an expert can easily detect the shallowness of attainment behind it.