ing of impending calamity. He paid it no especial
deference, but it made him feel indisposed to take the future into his
account. When, on his going to take leave of Madame Grandoni, this lady
asked at what time he would come back to Rome, he answered that he was
coming back either never or forever. When she asked him what he meant,
he said he really could n't tell her, and parted from her with much
genuine emotion; the more so, doubtless, that she blessed him in a quite
loving, maternal fashion, and told him she honestly believed him to be
the best fellow in the world.

The Villa Pandolfini stood directly upon a small grass-grown piazza,
on the top of a hill which sloped straight from one of the gates of
Florence. It offered to the outer world a long, rather low facade,
colored a dull, dark yellow, and pierced with windows of various sizes,
no one of which, save those on the ground floor, was on the same level
with any other. Within, it had a great, cool, gray cortile, with high,
light arches around it, heavily-corniced doors, of majestic altitude,
opening out of it, and a beautiful mediaeval well on one side of it.
Mrs. Hudson's rooms opened into a small garden supported on immense
substructions, which were planted on the farther side of the hill, as
it sloped steeply away. This garden was a charming place. Its south wall
was curtained with a dense orange vine, a dozen fig-trees offered you
their large-leaved shade, and over the low parapet the soft, grave
Tuscan landscape kept you company. The rooms themselves were as high as
chapels and as cool as royal sepulchres. Silence, peace, and security
seemed to abide in the ancient house and make it an ideal refuge for
aching hearts. Mrs. Hudson had a stunted, brown-faced Maddalena, who
wore a crimson handkerchief passed over her coarse, black locks and tied
under her sharp, pertinacious chin, and a smile which was as brilliant
as a prolonged flash of lightning. She smiled at everything in life,
especially the things she did n't like and which kept her talent for
mendacity in healthy exercise. A glance, a word, a motion was sufficient
to make her show her teeth at you like a cheerful she-wolf. This
inexpugnable smile constituted her whole vocabulary in her dealings with
her melancholy mistress, to whom she had been bequeathed by the late
occupant of the apartment, and who, to Rowland's satisfaction,
promised to be diverted from her maternal sorrows by the still
deeper perpl