would have welcomed back the Austrians if I could have been secure of fifty thousand lire. But I might as well have cried for the moon. And yet, nearly a week before the child was married, far more than fifty thousand lire were mine, had I known it. He died, it seems, months ago, at his property far away in the country, in Sicily. He was ninety-five. Only think, signora, of anyone being unlucky enough to live to be ninety-five! I was his only living direct relative. All the others were gone. Everything that he had comes to me. I am again in the possession of an income--nay, I am well off, at ease, so far as my ideas go ... and I did not know it in time to save her.’ There was a long silence. Sweeping over Minna’s mind came the full sense of the miserable, sordid tragedy of the situation. Another thought, which she would not for the world have hurt him by uttering, was that his poor little property would not have had a feather’s weight in the balance with Signora Dietrich when she was arranging Fulvia’s marriage with Marchmont. ‘What can I say?’ she said at last. ‘There is nothing to say.’ ‘Nothing. I quite agree with you,’ he replied bitterly, and they were both silent again, till at last she asked: ‘And your work--and your lodging? What are you doing about that?’ ‘As for the lodging, it is not worth while to change it,’ he said despondently. ‘I am in the same place--Via----’ He named a wretched little street, quite near to where he had left her on that evening when they had been to Hadrian’s Villa, near the Forum of Trajan, and Minna felt all the sordid wretchedness and discomfort which he had gone through pierce her own heart. ‘But you go to the office every day?’ she inquired gently. ‘No more,’ he said. ‘They did not want me. I had begun to make mistakes. They were very kind, but they wanted to get rid of me.’