ve seen Trombin's pink cheeks and well-turned figure not
very far away. For he was a susceptible creature, as he often confessed
to his companion, and the very first sight of Ortensia on the morning of
her marriage had made a deep impression on him. It was not only her face
and her hair, which resembled that of the late lamented Titian's Beauty;
there was something in her figure and walk that made him half mad when
he watched her; hers was not the stately stride of the black-eyed
plebeian beauty, balancing her huge copper 'conca' on her classic head,
still less was it the swaying, hip-dislocating, self-advertising gait of
some of those handsome and fashionable ladies who frequented the Villa
Medici on Sunday afternoons, and progressed through a running fire of
compliments from pale-faced young gentlemen of wealth and noble lineage.
Perhaps, after all, it was not Ortensia's walk in itself, but also
every movement of her beautiful body that made the Bravo's pulses throb;
it was not her step only, with all the mystery the moving draperies
could mean, but the grace in the half-turn of her head too, the
undulating motion of her hand and wrist and half-bent arm when she
fanned herself, the resistless seduction in her flexible figure when she
turned quickly to Stradella, while leaning on his arm and still walking
on, to ask some new question, or in pleased surprise at something he had
just told her.

The end of their first days of peace at the Orso came one afternoon
quite suddenly in the queer round church of San Stefano Rotondo, which
is not like any other in the world, and is entirely decorated, if the
word may be so misused, with representations of the awful tortures
undergone by early martyrs. If Stradella himself had ever been there, he
would not have taken his wife to see such sights, but the church was not
more often open then than now, and the two went in from pure curiosity.

As they entered the vast circular aisle and turned to the right, they
came suddenly upon a group of fashionable people listening to the
explanations of an imposing gentleman with perfectly white hair, who
indicated the points of interest in a picture with a heavy stick made of
a narwhale's ivory horn. He was describing minutely and realistically
the sufferings of a virgin martyr, and his chief hearer followed what he
said with absorbed interest.

Stradella instantly recognised the ex-Queen of Sweden. There was no
mistaking the daughter of Gust