Corso every afternoon, considered her nice-looking. One
peculiarity had made her somewhat notorious. There was some one whom she
loved and from whom she never accepted aught but a bouquet of white
roses; and folks would smile indulgently when at times for weeks together
she was seen driving round the Pincio with those pure, white bridal
flowers on the carriage seat.

Dario, however, suddenly paused in his explanations to address a
ceremonious bow to a lady who, accompanied by a gentleman, drove by in a
large landau. Then he simply said to the priest: "My mother."

Pierre already knew of her. Viscount de la Choue had told him her story,
how, after Prince Onofrio Boccanera's death, she had married again,
although she was already fifty; how at the Corso, just like some young
girl, she had hooked with her eyes a handsome man to her liking--one,
too, who was fifteen years her junior. And Pierre also knew who that man
was, a certain Jules Laporte, an ex-sergeant of the papal Swiss Guard, an
ex-traveller in relics, compromised in an extraordinary "false relic"
fraud; and he was further aware that Laporte's wife had made a
fine-looking Marquis Montefiori of him, the last of the fortunate
adventurers of romance, triumphing as in the legendary lands where
shepherds are wedded to queens.

At the next turn, as the large landau again went by, Pierre looked at the
couple. The Marchioness was really wonderful, blooming with all the
classical Roman beauty, tall, opulent, and very dark, with the head of a
goddess and regular if somewhat massive features, nothing as yet
betraying her age except the down upon her upper lip. And the Marquis,
the Romanised Swiss of Geneva, really had a proud bearing, with his solid
soldierly figure and long wavy moustaches. People said that he was in no
wise a fool but, on the contrary, very gay and very supple, just the man
to please women. His wife so gloried in him that she dragged him about
and displayed him everywhere, having begun life afresh with him as if she
were still but twenty, spending on him the little fortune which she had
saved from the Villa Montefiori disaster, and so completely forgetting
her son that she only saw the latter now and again at the promenade and
acknowledged his bow like that of some chance acquaintance.

"Let us go to see the sun set behind St. Peter's," all at once said
Dario, conscientiously playing his part as a showman of curiosities.

The victoria thereupon returne