'What were you doing in there?' she asked him, still smiling in the same
manner.

'Your husband was showing me some unique curiosities.'

'Ah!'

There was a sardonic sneer upon her lips, a manifest mocking scorn in
her voice. She settled herself on a wide divan covered with a Bokhara
carpet of faded amaranthine hues on which languished great cushions
embroidered with spreading palms of dull gold. Here she leaned back in
an easy, graceful attitude, and gazed at Andrea from under her drooping
eyelids, while she spoke of trivial society matters in a voice that
insinuated its tones into the young man's heart, and crept through his
blood like an invisible fire.

Two or three times, he surprised a look which Lord Heathfield fixed upon
his wife--a look that seemed surcharged with all the infamies he had
stirred up just now. Again that criminal thought sped through his mind.
He trembled in every fibre of his being. He started to his feet, livid
and convulsed.

'Going already?' exclaimed Lord Heathfield. 'Why, what is the matter?'
and he smiled a singular smile at his 'young friend.' He knew well the
effect of his books.

Sperelli bowed. Elena gave him her hand without rising. Her husband
accompanied him to the door, where he repeated in a low voice--'You
won't forget those clasps?'

As Andrea stood in the portico, he saw a carriage coming up the drive. A
man with a great golden beard nodded to him from the window. It was
Galeazzo Secinaro.

In a flash, the recollection of the May Bazaar came back to him, and the
episode of Galeazzo offering Elena a sum of money if she would dry her
beautiful hands, all wet with champagne, on his beard. He hurried
through the garden and out into the street. He had a dull confused sense
as of some deafening noise going on inside his head.

It was an afternoon at the end of April, warm and moist.

The sun appeared and disappeared again among the fleecy slow-sailing
clouds. The languor of the sirocco lay over Rome.

On the pavement in front of him in the Via Sistina, he perceived a lady
walking slowly in the direction of the Trinita. He recognised her as
Donna Maria Ferres. He looked at his watch; it was on the stroke of
five; only a minute or two before the accustomed hour of meeting. Maria
was assuredly on her way to the Palazzo Zuccari.

He hastened forward to join her. When he reached her side, he called her
by name.

She started violently. 'What? You here? I was just going u