olitical
considerations, so that her drawing-room might remain a meeting-place of
the black world, a power and a threat.

And Pierre divined by her greeting that she deemed him of little account,
petty foreign priest that he was, not even a prelate. This too again
surprised him, again brought the puzzling question to the fore: Why had
he been invited, what was expected of him in this society from which the
humble were usually excluded? Knowing the Princess to be austerely
devout, he at last fancied that she received him solely out of regard for
her kinsman, the Viscount, for in her turn she only found these words of
welcome: "We are so pleased to receive good news of Monsieur de la Choue!
He brought us such a beautiful pilgrimage two years ago."

Passing the first through the doorway, she at last ushered the young
priest into the adjoining reception-room. It was a spacious square
apartment, hung with old yellow _brocatelle_ of a flowery Louis XIV
pattern. The lofty ceiling was adorned with a very fine panelling, carved
and coloured, with gilded roses in each compartment. The furniture,
however, was of all sorts. There were some high mirrors, a couple of
superb gilded pier tables, and a few handsome seventeenth-century
arm-chairs; but all the rest was wretched. A heavy round table of
first-empire style, which had come nobody knew whence, caught the eye
with a medley of anomalous articles picked up at some bazaar, and a
quantity of cheap photographs littered the costly marble tops of the pier
tables. No interesting article of _virtu_ was to be seen. The old
paintings on the walls were with two exceptions feebly executed. There
was a delightful example of an unknown primitive master, a
fourteenth-century Visitation, in which the Virgin had the stature and
pure delicacy of a child of ten, whilst the Archangel, huge and superb,
inundated her with a stream of dazzling, superhuman love; and in front of
this hung an antique family portrait, depicting a very beautiful young
girl in a turban, who was thought to be Cassia Boccanera, the _amorosa_
and avengeress who had flung herself into the Tiber with her brother
Ercole and the corpse of her lover, Flavio Corradini. Four lamps threw a
broad, peaceful glow over the faded room, and, like a melancholy sunset,
tinged it with yellow. It looked grave and bare, with not even a flower
in a vase to brighten it.

In a few words Donna Serafina at once introduced Pierre to the company;
an