‘Gia! Well, what can I do?’ asked Fulvia carelessly. ‘I often sit up with him till about two in the morning, and then go; but sometimes, you know, I am really so tired, and perhaps have a hard day before me--not here, of course, but in other places where we have been--that I can’t do it. So I just tell the nurse what to do. She leaves his room for a few minutes, and then goes back again, and says Mrs. Marchmont begs him to excuse her, and she will come and see him first thing in the morning, before breakfast. That always makes him very angry, but he is helpless now. His anger comes to nothing. And of course the nurse hasn’t been to me at all. I have told her beforehand that I must have a whole night’s rest. One must, you know, sometimes. And on those nights when I know I shall not be disturbed, don’t I sleep! I make up for hours and hours of wakefulness then, and my maid can hardly get my eyes open in the morning.’ ‘Humph!’ snorted Signor Oriole, rising abruptly from his chair, and with a flash of his old rapid, irritable movement he left the room without a word to either of them. ‘He doesn’t like what I said,’ observed Fulvia with a heightened colour. ‘He is just the same as ever, though he looks so different. It is wonderful that he should have settled down here,’ she added, as if somewhat glad to turn the subject of her discourse. ‘I would never have believed it if anyone had told me. You know, in the bad times when he was exiled from Italy, along with a lot of the others, and when he was travelling about, doing all kinds of odd things to keep himself alive, he was in Malta and Greece and Turkey and the Crimea and Switzerland, but he never came to England, as so many of his compatriots did. I have thought of it many a time. He is so thoroughly Southern in every thought and feeling and impulse, and yet here he is, in this English house, in this cold, Northern English country.’ Minna laughed a little. ‘Yes, it’s quite true,’ she said; ‘it is wonderful; and yet, you know, the English and Italians are so much alike--the Romans, at any rate, in some deep, far-reaching substratum of their characters or temperaments. I have often been struck with it. It is only on the outside that we are so different.’ ‘What does he do all day? What does he study now?’ ‘What he always loved and always managed to study in the midst of his greatest troubles: archæology, and history, and ancient art and antiquarian things--what he calls the history of the dust of Rome.’ ‘Rome,’ repeated Fulvia in a deep voice, all her lightness of tone and manner gone. She had clasped her hands round her knee. ‘Yes, he is Roman through and through: who could ever be anything else who had once been Roman? I also,’ she added dreamily, as she looked across the dazzling yellow green of the lawn in front of the house towards a wooded glade of the park, fringed by heavy trees of a deep shade of foliage--‘I also.’