Without the city walls, hidden by the umbrella pines, and back from those secluded walks where young Rome takes its pleasure, stood the Villa Salvarino, almost under the shade of the walls, and hard by the gate of San Pancrazio. In the more prosperous days of the Eternal City, it might have been, and indeed was, the residence of some great Roman family; but aristocracies decline and families pass away; and the haughty owners were by no means averse from making a few English pounds by letting it to any traveller who had the inclination or the means to spend a few months there. The present tenant at this bright Easter-time, Sir Geoffrey Charteris, of Grosvenor Square, London, W., and Haversham Park, in the county of Dorset, Baronet, Deputy-lieutenant, and Justice of the Peace, was a man of long descent. The pale azure fluid in his veins was not the blood of us poor mortals; his life-giving stream had been transmitted through succeeding generations from a long line of gallant warriors and gentle dames; from fearless ancestors who followed their sovereign at the call to arms, marched with Richard of the Lion-heart to the Holy Sepulchre, and maybe crossed swords with the doughty Saladin himself. The title, conferred upon a Charteris by the Black Prince in person after the glorious field of Creçy, had known no tarnish as it passed down the long line of great and good men, soldiers, statesmen, and divines, to the present worthy representative of all these honours. Not that he had greatly distinguished himself in any field, save as an Under-secretary in a short-lived inglorious Ministry, where he had made a lasting name as the most incompetent individual ever appointed to office, though he dated every subsequent event and prefixed every after-dinner story by an allusion to the time when he was in the Earl of Muddleton’s Ministry. The reception rooms of the villa were crowded when our friends arrived. It was a kind of informal after-dinner reception, attended by most of the English visitors lingering after the Carnival, with some sprinkling of the resident aristocracy; for Sir Geoffrey liked to gather people round him, birth and genius being equally welcome. Sir Geoffrey looked every inch an English gentleman, standing there among his guests. He was apparently about fifty years of age, tall and straight, thoroughbred from his stiff gray hair to the small shapely feet, as yet untroubled by the family gout. His eyes were pale blue, and somewhat weak; his face, clear-cut and refined, with an aquiline nose and a high white forehead, but the whole marred by a mouth weak and nervous to the last degree. A connoisseur of art, a dabbler in literature, and last, but not least, a firm believer in spiritualism.