lls
were silent in their towers? Perhaps not; and yet when, a few years
later, the Countess of Albany was already wont to say that her married
life had been just such as befitted a woman who had gone to the altar on
Good Friday, she must have remembered, and the remembrance must have
seemed fraught with ill omen, that last day of her girlhood, travelling
through the black deserted valleys of the March, through the
world-forgotten mountain-towns with their hushed bells and black-draped
churches and funereally strewn streets.

At Loreto--where, as a good Catholic, the Princess Louise of Stolberg
doubtless prayed for a blessing on her marriage, in the great sanctuary
which encloses with silver and carved marble the little house of the
Virgin--at Loreto the bride was met by a Jacobite dignitary, Lord
Carlyle, and five servants in the crimson liveries of England. At
Macerata, one of the larger towns of the March of Ancona, she was
awaited by her bridegroom. A noble family of the province, the
Compagnoni-Marefoschis, one of whom, a cardinal, was an old friend of
the Stuarts, had placed their palace at the disposal of the royal pair.
We most of us know what such palaces, in small Italian provincial towns
south of the Apennines, are apt to be; huge, gloomy, shapeless masses of
brickwork and mouldering plaster, something between a mediaeval fortress
and a convent; great black archways, where the refuse of the house, the
filth of the town, has peaceably accumulated (and how much more in those
days); magnificent statued staircases given over to the few servants
who have replaced the armed bravos of two centuries ago; long suites
of rooms, vast, resounding like so many churches, glazed in the last
century with tiny squares of bad glass, through which the light
comes green and thick as through sea-water; carpets still despised
as a new-fangled luxury from France; the walls, not cheerful with
eighteenth-century French panel and hangings, but covered with big naked
frescoed men and women, or faded arras; few fire-places, but those few
enormous, looking like a huge red cavern in the room. The Marefoschis
had got together all their best furniture and plate, and the palace was
filled with torches and wax lights; a funereal illumination in a
funereal place, it must have seemed to the little Princess of Stolberg,
fresh from the brilliant nattiness of the Parisian houses of the time of
Louis XV.

The bride alighted; a small, plump, well-p