monies that are gay yet touched with peace. On the walls hung a few
reproductions of fine pictures: an old woman of Rembrandt, in whose
wrinkled face and glittering dark eyes the past pleasures and past
sorrows of life seemed tenderly, pensively united, mellowed by the years
into a soft bloom, a quiet beauty; an allegory of Watts, fierce with
inspiration like fire mounting up to an opening heaven; a landscape of
Frederick Walker's, the romance of harvest in an autumn land;
Burne-Jones's "The Mill," and a copy in oils of a knight of Gustave
Moreau's, riding in armor over the summit of a hill into an unseen
country of errantry, some fairy-land forlorn. There was, too, an old
Venetian mirror in a curiously twisted golden frame.

At the two small windows on either side of the door, which was half
glass, half white-painted wood, were thin curtains of pale gray-blue and
white, bought in the bazaars of Tunis. For furniture there were a
folding-table of brown, polished wood, a large divan with many cushions,
two deck-chairs of the telescope species, that can be made long or short
at will, a writing-table, a cottage piano, and four round wicker chairs
with arms. In one corner of the room stood a tall clock with a burnished
copper face, and in another a cupboard containing glass and china. A door
at the back, which led into the kitchen, was covered with an Oriental
portiere. On the writing-table, and on some dwarf bookcases already
filled with books left behind by Hermione on her last visit to Sicily,
stood rough jars of blue, yellow, and white pottery, filled with roses
and geraniums arranged by Gaspare. To the left of the room, as Lucrezia
faced it, was a door leading into the bedroom, of the master and
mistress.

After a long moment of admiring contemplation, Lucrezia went into this
bedroom, in which she was specially interested, as it was to be her
special care. All was white here, walls, ceiling, wooden beds, tables,
the toilet service, the bookcases. For there were books here, too, books
which Lucrezia examined with an awful wonder, not knowing how to read. In
the window-seat were white cushions. On the chest of drawers were more
red roses and geraniums. It was a virginal room, into which the bright,
golden sunbeams stole under the striped awning outside the low window
with surely a hesitating modesty, as if afraid to find themselves
intruders. The whiteness, the intense quietness of the room, through
whose window could be