returned. The young
girl hated to be followed about and protected at every step, especially
by a servant, who could have no real understanding of what she saw.

"I shall only be seen by foreigners and Cook's Tourists," she had said,
"and they do not count as human beings at all!"

Therefore the middle-aged Petersen, who was a German, and therefore a
species of foreigner herself, had meekly sat down upon the comparatively
comfortable stone which Cecilia had selected for her, and which was one
of the steps of the Julian Basilica. She was called Frau Petersen, Mrs.
Petersen, or Madame Petersen, according to circumstances, by the
servants of different nationalities who were successively in the
employment of the Countess Fortiguerra, for she was a superior woman and
the widow of a paymaster in the Bavarian army, and so eminently
respectable and well educated that she had more than once been taken for
Cecilia's governess.

Petersen was excessively near-sighted, but her nose was not adapted by
its nature and position for wearing eyeglasses; for it was not only a
flat nose without anything like a prominent bridge to it, but it was
placed uncommonly low in her face, so that a pair of eyeglasses pinched
upon it would have found themselves in the region of Petersen's
cheek-bones. Even when she wore spectacles, they were always slipping
down, which was a great nuisance; so she resigned herself to seeing less
than other people, except when something interested her enough to make
the discomfort of glasses worth enduring.

This sufficiently explains why she noticed nothing unusual in Cecilia's
looks when the latter came back to her, pale and disturbed; and she had
not heard her mistress's faint cry, the distance being too great for
that, not to mention the fact that the huge ruins intercepted the sound.
Cecilia was glad of that, as she drove home with Petersen.

"Signor Lamberti has called," said the Countess Fortiguerra the next day
at luncheon. "I see by his card that he is in the Navy. You know he is
one of the Marchese Lamberti's sons. Shall we ask him to dinner?"

"Did you like him?" enquired Cecilia, evasively.

"He is not very good-looking," observed the Countess, whose judgment of
unknown people always began with their appearance, and often penetrated
no farther. "But he may be intelligent, for all that," she added, as a
concession.

"Yes," said Cecilia, thoughtfully, "perhaps."

"I think we might ask him to dinner,