III.

Del Ferice kept his word and arranged matters for Orsino with a speed
and skill which excited the latter's admiration. The affair was not
indeed very complicated though it involved a deed of sale, the transfer
of a mortgage and a deed of partnership between Orsino Saracinesca and
Andrea Contini, architect, under the style "Andrea Contini and Company,"
besides a contract between this firm of the one party and the bank in
which Del Ferice was a director, of the other, the partners agreeing to
continue the building of the half-finished house, and the bank binding
itself to advance small sums up to a certain amount for current expenses
of material and workmen's wages. Orsino signed everything required of
him after reading the documents, and Andrea Contini followed his
example.

The architect was a tall man with bright brown eyes, a dark and somewhat
ragged beard, close cropped hair, a prominent, bony forehead and large,
coarsely shaped, thin ears oddly set upon his head. He habitually wore a
dark overcoat, of which the collar was generally turned up on one side
and not on the other. Judging from the appearance of his strong shoes he
had always been walking a long distance over bad roads, and when it had
rained within the week his trousers were generally bespattered with mud
to a considerable height above the heel. He habitually carried an
extinguished cigar between his teeth of which he chewed the thin black
end uneasily. Orsino fancied that he might be about eight and twenty
years old, and was not altogether displeased with his appearance. He was
not at all like the majority of his kind, who, in Rome at least, usually
affect a scrupulous dandyism of attire and an uncommon refinement of
manner. Whatever Contini's faults might prove to be, Orsino did not
believe that they would turn out to be those of idleness or vanity. How
far he was right in his judgment will appear before long, but he
conceived his partner to be gifted, frank, enthusiastic and careless of
outward forms.

As for the architect himself, he surveyed Orsino with a sort of
sympathetic curiosity which the latter would have thought unpleasantly
familiar if he had understood it. Contini had never spoken before with
any more exalted personage than Del Ferice, and he studied the young
aristocrat as though he were a being from another world. He hesitated
some time as to the proper mode of addressing him and at last decided to
call him "Signor Principe." O