hinges and hideously apparent. The great
hall must all be painted again, and Angelo could live overhead and come
down to his work by those steps. With childish pleasure she praised her
own ingenuity in so arranging matters beforehand. Angelo was to help her
in all she did, until the Palazzetto Borgia should be as beautiful as
the Palazzo Braccio itself, though of course it was much smaller. Then
she scrawled on the walls again, trying to explain to him, in childishly
futile sketches, her ideas of decoration, and he would come down from
his scaffold and do his best with a few broad lines to show her what she
had really imagined, till she clapped her small, dusty hands with
delight and was ultimately carried off by her governess to be made
presentable for her daily drive in the Villa Borghese with the Princess
of Gerano.

As a girl Francesca had the rare gift of seeing clearly in her mind what
she wanted, and at last she had found herself possessed of the power to
carry out her intentions. As a matter of course she had taken Reanda
into her confidence as her chief helper, and the intimacy which dated
from her childhood had continued on very much the same footing. His
talent had grown and been consolidated by ten years of good work, and
she, as a young married woman, had understood what she had meant when
she had been a child. Reanda was now admittedly, in his department, the
first painter in Rome, and that was fame in those days. His high
education and general knowledge of all artistic matters made him an
interesting companion in such work as Francesca had undertaken, and he
had, moreover, a personal charm of manner and voice which had always
attracted her.

No one, perhaps, would have called him a handsome man, and at this time
he was no longer in his first youth. He was tall, thin, and very dark,
though his black beard had touches of a deep gold-brown colour in it,
which contrasted a little with his dusky complexion. He had a sad face,
with deep, lustreless, thoughtful eyes, which seemed to peer inward
rather than outward. In the olive skin there were heavy brown shadows,
and the bony prominence of the brow left hollows at the temples, from
which the fine black hair grew with a backward turn which gave something
unusual to his expression. The aquiline nose which characterizes so many
Roman faces, was thin and delicate, with sensitive nostrils that often
moved when he was speaking. The eyebrows were irregular and thick,