“Stronger than many men,” said Muriella with pride. “They know it all through the Selve.” “Strength is a guardian angel,” said the elder woman. “But a woman’s strength is a devil in disguise sometimes; she trusts to it; and lo!--it snaps, and she falls.” “That may well be,” said Muriella gravely. As she bent down over the brazier its red reflection shone on the fine outline of her brow and cheek, on the thickness of her raven hair, on the dark line of her up-curling lashes. “You are a morsel for a monarch,” thought Caterina, but she did not say it; it was known that the girl did not like such jokes. Instead, she said: “I am going to change the mattress in Ser Cirillo’s room. Come and give me a helping hand.” Muriella went without demur. When the lifting and changing of the mattress on the great mediæval bed with its gilded baldachino and crown was done, she stood and looked around her. “What are these?” she said, pointing to the telescope upon its stand and the celestial globe. “Uncanny things that bring no good to anyone,” answered Caterina. “That big tube lets you get up to the moon quite close; you can hear the people in it talking.” “Saints above us!” said the girl, much astonished; “I always thought the moon was a lamp.” “So do all folks as keep their senses,” said Caterina, with that contempt of ignorance for knowledge, which is of all scorn the most derisive. The eyes of Muriella surveyed the chamber with awe. It was very large, with vast windows, a tessellated floor, faded frescoed walls, and the grand bed with hangings in purple satin, once a cardinal’s. There were some oaken tables and dressers, and a few huge chairs with leathern seats, and from the centre of the ceiling hung a bronze Etruscan lamp found centuries earlier in the forest underground. On one of the tables stood an earthen jar filled with the autumn colchicum, and there were many books and many drawings. Bare and plain though the room was, it had that nobility which comes from ancient usage, and the indefinable grace in it which is given to their habitations by those whose pursuits are intellectual and whose tastes are artistic. “It feels like a church,” said Muriella to herself: she had always in her memory the churches of Viterbo, where she had gone with her mother, and above all of the Duomo of San Lorenzo there, where Guy de Montfort slew Henry of Cornwall before the high altar, and where an English Pope forced a German Emperor to hold his stirrup as vassal of the Holy See. This chamber, with its three great windows facing the west, filled her with a dim pleasure and veneration as the altars and aisles of San Lorenzo had done. But she looked for one thing which she did not see. “There are no arms,” she said to Caterina; “not even a hunting-knife.” “He has a revolver,” said the old woman. “But you are right, my dear. There should be more weapons nigh at hand. The _guardiani_ have all guns, it is true.”