and she sat
down on a low wall by the roadside to devour them. She did not think
much about anything now, she could not even feel that she cared what
happened to her, but she adhered to the resolution she had made to
keep out of the way until Tor di Rocca had left Florence. She could
not sit long. It was cold and she was poorly clad, so poorly that the
woman in the cottage had believed her to be a beggar. The Prince would
have had to buy her clothes before he could take her away with him.

She wandered about until nightfall and then made her way back to the
house in the Borgo, footsore and cold and wretched, but still the
captain of her soul; ragged, but free and in no man's livery.

The landlady heard her coming slowly up the stairs and came out of her
room to speak to her.

"A gentleman called for you this morning. I told him you were gone out
and that you had changed your mind about leaving Florence, and at
first he seemed angry, and then he laughed. 'Tell her we shall meet
again,' he said. Then another came this afternoon in an automobile and
asked if you lived here, and when I said you were out he said he would
come again this evening. He left his card."

Olive looked at it with dazed eyes. Her pale face flushed, but as she
went on up the stairs the colour ebbed away until even her lips were
white. She had to rest twice before she could reach her own landing,
and when she had entered her room she could go no farther than the
door. She fell, and it was some time before she could get up again,
but she still held the card crumpled in her hand.

"Jean Avenel."

CHAPTER IX

The Villa Fiorelli is set high among the olive groves above the
village of Settignano. There are Medicean balls on a shield over the
great wrought-iron gates, and the swarthy splendid banker princes
appear as the Magi in the faded fresco painting of the Nativity in the
chapel. They have knelt there in the straw of the stable of Bethlehem
for more than four hundred years. The _nobili_ of Florence were used
to loiter long ago on the terrace in the shade of the five cypresses,
and women, famous or infamous, but always beautiful, listened to
sonnets said and songs sung in their honour in the scented idleness of
the rose garden. The villa belonged first to handsome, reckless
Giuliano, the lover of Simonetta and others, and the father of a Pope,
and when the dagger thrusts of the Pazzi put an end to his short life
his elder brother and lor