“Your sister,” she said seriously, “has found some wrinkles on her forehead.” Lavinia with difficulty restrained a sharp giggle. Gheta's grief and their mother's anxiety at first seemed so foolishly disproportionate to their cause. Then a realization of what such an occurrence meant to Gheta dawned upon her. To an acknowledged beauty like Gheta Sanviano the marks of Time were an absolute tragedy; they threatened her on every plane of her being. “But when--” Lavinia began. “They--Anna Mantegazza and she--went to the dressing room at the Guarinis', where, it seems, Anna discovered them--sympathetically, of course.” Gheta's sobbing slowly subsided under the marchesa's urgent plea that unrestrained emotion would only deepen her trouble. She did not appear at dinner; and afterward the marchese, his wife and Lavinia sat wrapped in a gloomy silence. The marchesa was still handsome, in spite of increasing weight. The gray gaze inherited by Lavinia had escaped the parent; her eyes were soft and dense, like brown velvet. She was a woman of decision and now she brought her hands smartly together. “We have waited too long with Gheta; we should not have counted so confidently on her beauty; time flies so treacherously. She must marry as soon as possible.” “Thank God, there's Cesare Orsi!” her husband responded. Lavinia was gazing inward at the secretly enshrined image of the Flower of Spain. III Gheta Sanviano often passed a night at the Mantegazzas' villa on the Height of Castena, a long mile from the city. Lavinia, too, knew the dwelling well, for Sanviano and Pier Mantegazza had been intimate from their similar beginnings, and she had played there as a child. However, she had never been regularly asked with Gheta; and when that occurred--Gheta indifferently delivered Anna Mantegazza's message--and her mother acquiesced, Lavinia had a renewed sense of her growing importance. She went out early, in the heat of midday, a time that fitted best with the involved schedule of the Sanvianos' single equipage--Anna would take her sister directly from a luncheon at the Ginoris'. Lavinia looked with mingled anticipation and relief at the approaching graceful façade added scarcely a hundred and fifty years before to the otherwise somber abode of the Mantegazzas, first established in the twelfth century. The villa stood on an eminence, circled by austere pines, and terraced with innumerable vegetable gardens and frugally planted olives. The road mounted abruptly, turned under a frowning wall incongruously topped with delicately painted urns, and doubled across the massive iron-bound door that closed the arched entrance. Within, an immensely high timbered hall was pleasantly cool and dark after the white blaze without. It was bare of furnishing except for a number of rude oak settles against the naked stone walls. It had been a place of fear to Lavinia when a child; and even now she left it with a sense of relief for the modernized interior beyond.