light she found, of course, another apartment, on the same plan as the
one below, but smaller and less stately. The central hall entered from a
door supported by marble caryatids, was flagged in yellow marble, and
frescoed freely with faded eighteenth-century scenes--cardinals walking
in stiff gardens, a pope alighting from his coach, surrounded by
peasants on their knees, and behind him fountains and obelisk and the
towering facade of St. Peter's. At the moment, thanks to a last glow of
light coming in through a west window at the farther end, it was a place
beautiful though forlorn. But the rooms into which she looked on either
side were wreck and desolation itself, crowded with broken furniture,
many of them shuttered and dark.

As she closed the last door, her attention was caught by a strange bust
placed on a pedestal above the entrance. What was wrong with it? An
accident? An injury? She went nearer, straining her eyes to see.
No!--there was no injury. The face indeed was gone. Or, rather, where
the face should have been there now descended a marble veil from brow to
breast, of the most singular and sinister effect. Otherwise the bust was
that of a young and beautiful woman. A pleasing horror seized on Kitty
as she looked. Her fancy hunted for the clew. A faithless wife, blotted
from her place?--made infamous forever by the veil which hid from human
eye the beauty she had dishonored? Or a beloved mistress, on whom the
mourning lover could no longer bear to look--the veil an emblem of
undying and irremediable grief?

Kitty stood enthralled, striving to pierce the ghastly meaning of the
bust, when a sound--a distant sound--a shock through her. She heard a
step overhead, in the topmost apartment, or <i>mansarde</i> of the palace, a
step that presently traversed the whole length of the floor immediately
above her head and began to descend the stair.

Strange! Federigo must have shut the great gates by this time--as she
had bade him? He himself inhabited the smaller <i>entresol</i> on the farther
side of the palace, far away. Other inhabitants there were none; so
Donna Laura had assured her.

The step approached, resonant in the silence. Kitty, seized with nervous
fright, turned and ran down the broad staircase by which she had come,
through the series of deserted rooms in the <i>piano nobile</i>, till she
reached the great hall.

There she paused, panting, curiosity and daring once more getting the
upperhand. The