's death, she
had accompanied the motherless girl to concerts and had walked with
her almost daily in the mornings. She was one of those thoroughly
trustworthy, sound-minded, well-educated Frenchwomen of the middle
class of whom many are to be found in the provinces, though the type
is rare in Paris; nearly fifty years of age, she had lived twenty
years in Rome, always occupying the same little apartment in a
respectable street of Trastevere, where she had a spare room which she
was glad to let to any French or English lady of small means who came
to Rome for a few months in the winter and spring.

Angela sent her maid for Madame Bernard on the day of the catastrophe,
since her aunt neither offered to take her in at once nor seemed
inclined to suggest any arrangement for the future. The Marchesa did,
indeed, take charge of everything in the Palazzo Chiaromonte within an
hour of her brother-in-law's death; she locked the drawers of his
private desk herself, sent for the notary and had the customary seals
placed on the doors of the inner apartments 'in the name of the
heirs'; she spoke with the undertaker and made every arrangement for
the customary lying in state of the body during the following night
and day; saw to the erection of the temporary altar at which masses
for the dead would be celebrated almost without interruption from
midnight to noon by sixteen priests in succession; gave full
instructions to the effect that the men-servants should take their
turn of duty in regular watches, day and night, until the funeral; and
finally left the palace, after showing herself to be an exceedingly
practical woman.

When she went away, she was holding her handkerchief to her eyes with
both hands and she forgot her parasol; but she remembered it as she was
just going out by the postern, her carriage being outside because the
gates were shut, and she sent her footman back for it and for the little
morocco bag in which she carried her handkerchief and card-case. It was
a small matter, but the porter, the footman, and the butler upstairs all
remembered it afterwards, and the footman himself, while coming down,
took the trouble to look into the little wallet, and saw that the
card-case was there, but nothing else; for the Marchesa sometimes
carried certain little cigarettes in it, which the man had found
particularly good. But to-day there was not even one.

Madame Bernard arrived in tears, for she was a warm-hearted woman, an