behind, into splendid openness and the range of the afternoon light.
In that quarter the villa overhung the slope of its hill and the long
valley of the Arno, hazy with Italian colour. It had a narrow garden, in
the manner of a terrace, productive chiefly of tangles of wild roses
and other old stone benches, mossy and sun-warmed. The parapet of the
terrace was just the height to lean upon, and beneath it the ground
declined into the vagueness of olive-crops and vineyards. It is not,
however, with the outside of the place that we are concerned; on this
bright morning of ripened spring its tenants had reason to prefer the
shady side of the wall. The windows of the ground-floor, as you saw
them from the piazza, were, in their noble proportions, extremely
architectural; but their function seemed less to offer communication
with the world than to defy the world to look in. They were massively
cross-barred, and placed at such a height that curiosity, even on
tiptoe, expired before it reached them. In an apartment lighted by a
row of three of these jealous apertures--one of the several distinct
apartments into which the villa was divided and which were mainly
occupied by foreigners of random race long resident in Florence--a
gentleman was seated in company with a young girl and two good sisters
from a religious house. The room was, however, less sombre than our
indications may have represented, for it had a wide, high door, which
now stood open into the tangled garden behind; and the tall iron
lattices admitted on occasion more than enough of the Italian
sunshine. It was moreover a seat of ease, indeed of luxury, telling
of arrangements subtly studied and refinements frankly proclaimed, and
containing a variety of those faded hangings of damask and tapestry,
those chests and cabinets of carved and time-polished oak, those angular
specimens of pictorial art in frames as pedantically primitive, those
perverse-looking relics of medieval brass and pottery, of which Italy
has long been the not quite exhausted storehouse. These things kept
terms with articles of modern furniture in which large allowance had
been made for a lounging generation; it was to be noticed that all the
chairs were deep and well padded and that much space was occupied by a
writing-table of which the ingenious perfection bore the stamp of London
and the nineteenth century. There were books in profusion and magazines
and newspapers, and a few small, odd, elabor