one."

"Well, I can't present you. It would be too compromising. And yet they
want men like you, very much, here. The Romans are so dull and stately,
and the English who frequent the best houses are so dreary. There, go
away now. You want leave to come to-morrow, but I 'll not grant it. I
must hear what Mrs. Trumpler says before I admit you again."

"When, then, may I--"

"I don't know; I have not thought of it Let it be--let it be when
you have gained your lawsuit," cried she, in a burst of laughter, and
hurried out of the room.

CHAPTER L. CATTARO.

If Cattaro was more picturesque and strange-looking than the Bramleighs
had expected, it was also far more poverty-stricken and desolate. The
little town, escarped out of a lofty mountain, with the sea in front,
consisted of little more than one straggling street, which followed
every bend and indentation of the shore. It is true, wherever a little
plateau offered on the mountain, a house was built; and to these small
winding paths led up, through rocks bristling with the cactus, or shaded
by oleanders large as olive-trees. Beautiful little bits of old Venetian
architecture, in balconies or porticos, peeped out here and there
through the dark foliage of oranges and figs; and richly ornamented
gates, whose arabesques yet glistened with tarnished gilding, were
festooned with many a flowery creeper, and that small banksia-rose,
so tasteful in its luxuriance. From the sea it would be impossible
to imagine anything more beautiful or more romantic. As you landed,
however, the illusion faded, and dirt, misery, and want stared at you
at every step. Decay and ruin were on all sides. Palaces, whose marble
mouldings and architraves were in the richest style of Byzantine art,
were propped up by rude beams of timber that obstructed the footway,
while from their windows and balconies hung rags and tattered draperies,
the signs of a poverty within great as the ruin without. The streets
were lined with a famished, half-clothed population, sitting idly or
sleeping. A few here and there affected to be vendors of fruit and
vegetables; but the mass were simply loungers reduced to the miserable
condition of an apathy which saw nothing better to be done with life
than dream it away. While Bramleigh and L'Estrange were full of horror
at the wretchedness of the place, their sisters were almost wild with
delight at its barbaric beauty, its grand savagery, and its brilliantly
picturesq