to the villa; Nobili
mounting upward to the forest with Fra Pacifico toward Corellia, to
await the marchesa's answer.

CHAPTER VI.

THE CONTRACT.

Fra Pacifico, with Adamo and Pipa, had labored ever since-daybreak
to arrange the rooms at the villa before the marchesa rose. Pipa had
freely used the broom and many pails of water. All the windows were
thrown open, and clouds of invisible incense from the flowers without
sweetened the fusty rooms.

The villa had not been inhabited for nearly fifty years. It was
scantily provided with furniture, but there were chairs and tables
and beds, and all the rough necessaries of life. To make all straight,
whole generations of beetles had been swept away; and patriarchal
spiders, which clung tenaciously to the damp spots on the walls. A
scorpion or two had been found, which, firmly resisting to quit the
chinks where they had grown and multiplied, had died by decapitation.
Fra Pacifico would not have owned it, but he had discovered and killed
a nest of black adders that lay concealed, curled up in a curtain.

He had with his own hands, in the early morning, carefully fashioned
the spacious sala on the ground-floor to the marchesa's liking. A huge
sofa, with a faded amber cover, had been drawn out of a recess, and
so placed that the light should fall at her back.--She objected to the
sunshine, with true Italian perverseness. Some arm-chairs, once gilt,
and still bearing a coronet, were placed in a semicircle opposite. The
windows of the sala, and two glass doors of the same size and make,
looked east and west; toward the terraces and the garden on one side,
and over the cliffs and the chasm to the opposite mountains on the
other. The walls were broken by doors of varnished pine-wood. These
doors led, on the right, to the chapel, Enrica's bedroom, and many
empty apartments; on the left, to the marchesa's suite of rooms, the
offices, and the stone corridor which communicated with the now ruined
tower. High up on the walls of the sala, two large and roughly-painted
frescoes decorated the empty spaces. A Dutch seaport on one side, with
sloping roofs and tall gables, bordering a broad river, upon which
ships sailed vaguely away into a yellow haze. (Not more vaguely
sailing, perhaps, than many human ships, with life-sails set to
catch the wind of fortune--ships which never make more way than
these painted emblems!) Opposite, a hunting-party of the olden time
picnicked in a for