Boroo had found his mistress by something keener than the sense of sight, and had pushed his cold, black nose against her cheek, despite of the bowed head, and leapt about her as she rose to her feet, just in time to hide all signs of agitation as Signor Canincio's odd man, in a loose red jacket, looking like a reformed bandit, brought in a pair of lamps and flooded the room with light. Louison rushed to shut the windows and exclude _cette affreuse bête le moustique_, from whose attentions she herself had suffered. "Mais, madame, pourquoi ne pas sonner? Vous voilà sans lumière, sans feu, et les fenêtres grandes ouvertes. Accendere, donc," to the odd man, "apportez legno, molto legno, et faire un bon fuoco, presto, subito, tout de suite." It may be that this noisy solicitude was meant to cover a certain want of attention to her mistress; Ma'mselle having lingered over the tea-table in the couriers' room, where a dearth of couriers at this dead season was atoned for by the presence of Signor Canincio and his English wife, she dispensing the weakest possible tea, with condescending kindness, and wife and husband both alert to hear anything that Louison would tell them about her mistress, while the animated gestures and expressive eyes of the host testified to his admiration for _la belle Française_, an admiration that was made more agreeable to Louison from the consuming jealousy which she saw depicted in the countenance of the travelling footman, whose inferior status ought to have excluded him from that table. But Louison knew that Canincio's hotel had always been what Mr. Sedgewick called _une affaire d'un seul cheval_. CHAPTER XXVII The Roman villa was a fairy palace of light and flowers, and its long range of windows flashed across the blue vapours of the December night, and might have been noticed as a golden glory in the far distance by solitary watchers in the monasteries on the Aventine hill. It was Vera's first reception; and all that there was of Roman rank and beauty, all that there was of transatlantic wealth and cosmopolitan talent in the most wonderful city in the world had assembled in prompt response to her card of invitation. "Mrs. Claude Rutherford, at home, 9 to 12. Music. "The Villa Provana." The financier's palace still bore the stamp of mercantile riches. Claude had urged his wife to give the splendid house a splendid name; so that, in the ever-changing society of the Italian capital, the source of all that splendour might be forgotten; but he had urged in vain. "It was his father's house, and it was my home with _him_," she said, with a strange look--the look that Claude feared. "While I live it shall never have any other name." "You are the first woman I ever knew with such a cult of the dismal," he said. "Most widows wish to forget." "Most widows _can_ forget," she answered.