p
that existed between them. The gentleman in question was for years
Lady Bulwer's constant and steadfast friend. It is quite true that he
would fain have been something more, but true also that his friendship
survived the absolute rejection of all warmer sentiments by the object
of it. It was almost a matter of course that such a woman as Lady
Bulwer, living unprotected in the midst of such a society as that of
Florence in those days, should be so slandered. And were it not that
there were very few if any persons at the time, and I think certainly
not one still left, able to speak upon the subject with such
_connaissance de cause_ as I can, I should not have alluded to it.

She was an admirably charming companion before the footlights of the
world's stage--not so uniformly charming behind its scenes, for
her unreasonableness always and her occasional violence were very
difficult to deal with. But she was, as Dickens's poor Jo says in
_Bleak House_, "werry good to me!"

CHAPTER VI.

After some little time and trouble we found an apartment in the
Palazzo Berti, in the ominously named Via dei Malcontenti. It was so
called because it was at one time the road to the Florentine Tyburn.
Our house was the one next to the east end of the church of Santa
Croce. Our rooms looked on to a large garden, and were pleasant
enough. We witnessed from our windows the building of the new steeple
of Santa Croce, which was completed before we left the house.

It was built in great measure by an Englishman, a Mr. Sloane, a
fervent Catholic, who was at that time one of the best-known figures
in the English colony at Florence.

He was a large contributor to the recently completed facade of the
Duomo in Florence, and to many other benevolent and pietistic good
works. He had been tutor in the Russian Boutourlin family, and when
acting in that capacity had been taken, by reason of his geological
acquirements, to see some copper mines in the Volterra district, which
the Grand Duke had conceded to a company under whose administration
they were going utterly to the bad. Sloane came, saw, and eventually
conquered. In conjunction with Horace Hall, the then well known and
popular partner in the bank of Signor Emanuele Fenzi (one of whose
sons married an English wife, and is still my very good and forty
years old friend), he obtained a new concession of the mines from
the Grand Duke on very favourable terms, and by the time I made his
acq