The hotel seemed in a strange commotion as Vera went downstairs. Chambermaids with brooms and dusters were running up and down the corridor on the first floor. Doors that were usually shut were all wide open to the soft spring breezes. Furniture was being carried from one room to another, and other furniture, that looked new, was being brought upstairs from the hall. Carpets and curtains were being shaken in the garden at the back of the hotel, and dust was being blown in through the open window on the landing. Vera wondered, but had not to wonder long; for at the luncheon table everybody was talking about the upheaval, and its cause, and a torrent of rambling chatter, in which widows and spinsters were almost shrill with excitement, gradually resolved itself into these plain facts. An Italian financier, Signor Mario Provana, the richest man in Rome, and one of the richest men in London, which, of course, meant a great deal more, was bringing his daughter to the hotel, a daughter in delicate health, sent by her doctors to the most eligible spot along the Western Ligura. The poor dear girl was in a very bad way, the old ladies told each other, threatened with consumption. She had two nurses besides her governess and maid, and the whole of the first floor had been taken by Signor Provana, to the annoyance of Lady Sutherland Jones, quite the most important inmate of the hotel, who had been made to exchange her first-floor bedroom for an apartment on the second floor, which Signor Canincio, the landlord, declared to be superior in every particular, as well as one lire less _per diem_. "I should have thought your husband would have hesitated before putting one of his best customers to inconvenience for a party who drops from the skies, and may never come here again," Lady Jones complained to the landlord's English wife, who was, if anything, more plausible than her Italian husband. The Holloway builder's widow was uncertain in her aspirates, more especially when discomposed by a sense of injury. Madame Canincio pleaded that they could not afford to turn away good fortune in the person of a Roman millionaire, who took a whole floor, and would have all his meals served in his private _salle à manger_, the extra charge for which indulgence would come to almost as much as her ladyship's "_arrangement_"; for Lady Sutherland Jones, albeit supposed to be wealthy, was not liberal. Her late husband had been knighted, after the opening by a Royal Princess of a vast pile of workmen's dwellings, paid for by an American philanthropist, and neither husband nor wife had achieved that shibboleth of gentility, the letter "h." Vera heard all about Signor Provana, and his daughter, next morning from Dr. Wilmot, who was more elated at the letting of the first floor to that great man than she had ever seen him by any other circumstance in the quiet life of San Marco.