the rooms
of the <i>mezzanino</i>.

Lord Magellan laughed. "What's the matter with her?"

"Oh, nothing!" said Kitty, impatiently, "except that she's wicked--and
common--and a snake--and your mother would have a fit if she knew you
had anything to do with her."

The red-haired youth looked grave.

"Thank you, Lady Kitty," he said, quietly. "I'll take your advice."

"Oh, I say, what a nice boy you are!" cried Kitty, impulsively, laying a
hand a moment on his shoulder. And then, as though his filial instinct
had awakened hers, she added, with hasty falsehood: "Maman, of course,
knows nothing about her. That was just bluff what she said. But Donna
Laura oughtn't to ask such people. There--that's the way."

And she pointed to a small staircase in the wall, whereof the trap-door
at the top was open. They climbed it, and found themselves at once in
one of the great rooms of the <i>piano nobile</i>, to which this quick and
easy access from the inhabited <i>entresol</i> had been but recently
contrived.

"What a marvellous place!" cried Lord Magellan, looking round him.

They were in the principal apartment of the famous Vercelli palace, a
legacy from one of those classical architects whose work may be seen in
the late seventeenth-century buildings of Venice. The rooms, enormously
high, panelled here and there in tattered velvets and brocades, or
frescoed in fast-fading scenes of old Venetian life, stretched in
bewildering succession on either side of a central passage or broad
corridor, all of them leading at last on the northern side to a vast
hall painted in architectural perspective by the pupils of Tiepolo, and
overarched by a ceiling in which the master himself had massed a
multitude of forms equal to Rubens in variety and facility of design,
expressed in a thin trenchancy of style. Figures recalling the ancient
triumphs and possessions of Venice, in days when she sat dishonored and
despoiled, crowded the coved roof, the painted cornices and pediments.
Gayly colored birds hovered in blue skies; philosophers and poets in
grisaille made a strange background for large-limbed beauties couched on
roses, or young warriors amid trophies of shining arms; and while all
this garrulous commonplace lived and breathed above, the walls below,
cold in color and academic in treatment, maintained as best they could
the dignity of the vast place, thus given up to one of the greatest of
artists and emptiest of minds.

On the floor