to-day, signorina."

CHAPTER VII

Olive saw the _padrone_ of the Aquila Verde that night before she went
to her room and told him she was leaving.

His face fell. "Signorina! I am sorry! I told Angelo to bring hot
water every time, always, when you rang. Have you not been well
served?"

She reassured him on that point and went on to explain that she was
going to live alone. "I have made arrangements," she added vaguely. "A
man will come with a truck to take my box away to-morrow morning."

And the _padrone_ was too much a man of his world to ask any more
questions.

There had been no rooms vacant in the _pension_ in Piazza
Indipendenza. The manservant who answered the door had recommended an
Italian lady who took paying guests, and Olive had gone to see her,
but her rooms were small, dark and dingy, and they smelt
overpoweringly of sandal wood and rancid oil. The shabbily-smart
_padrona_ had been voluble and even affectionate. "I am so fond of the
English," she said. "My husband is much occupied and I am often
lonely, but we shall be able to go out together and amuse ourselves,
you and I. I had been hoping to get an invitation to go to the
_Trecento_ ball at the Palazzo Vecchio, but Luigi cannot manage it.
Never mind! We will go to all the _Veglioni_. I love dancing." She
looked complacently down at her stubby little feet in their
down-at-heel beaded slippers.

Olive had been glad to get away when she heard the impossible terms,
but the afternoon was passing, and when she got to the house in the
Via dei Bardi she saw bills of sale plastered on its walls and a
litter of straw and torn paper in the courtyard. The porter came out
of his lodge to tell her that one of the daughters had died.

"They all went away, and the furniture was sold yesterday."

As Olive had never really wished to live and eat with strangers she
was not greatly depressed by these experiences, but she was cold and
tired, and her head ached, and when on her way back to the Aquila
Verde she saw a card, "_Affitasi, una camera, senza mobilia_," in the
doorway of one of the old houses in the Borgo San Jacopo, she went in
and up the long flight of steep stone stairs without any definite idea
of what she wanted beyond a roof to shelter her.

A shrivelled, snuffy old woman showed her the room. It was very large
and lofty, and it had two great arched windows that looked out upon
the huddled roofs of Oltr'Arno. The brick floor was worn and