and dispenses a poisonous, sour drink
to those who will buy. But that is only in the warm months. The winter
winds blow the wretched booth to pieces and increase the desolation.
Further on, tall facades rise suddenly up, the blue sky gleaming
through their windows, the green moss already growing upon their naked
stones and bricks. The Barbarini of the future, if any should arise,
will not need to despoil the Colosseum to quarry material for their
palaces. If, as the old pasquinade had it the Barbarini did what the
Barbarians did not, how much worse than barbarians have these modern
civilizers done!

The distress was very great in the early months of 1889. The
satisfaction which many of the new men would have felt at the ruin of
great old families was effectually neutralized by their own financial
destruction. Princes, bankers, contractors and master masons went down
together in the general bankruptcy. Ugo Del Ferice survived and with him
Andrea Contini and Company, and doubtless other small firms which he
protected for his own ends. San Giacinto, calm, far-seeing, and keen as
an eagle, surveyed the chaos from the height of his magnificent fortune,
unmoved and immovable, awaiting the lowest ebb of the tide. The
Saracinesca looked on, hampered a little by the sudden fall in rents and
other sources of their income, but still superior to events, though
secretly anxious about Orsino's affairs, and daily expecting that he
must fail.

And Orsino himself had changed, as was natural enough. He was learning
to seem what he was not, and those who have learned that lesson know how
it influences the real man whom no one can judge but himself. So long as
there had been one person in his life with whom he could live in perfect
sympathy he had given himself little trouble about his outward
behaviour. So long as he had felt that, come what might, his mother was
on his side, he had not thought it worth his while not to be natural
with every one, according to his humour. He was wrong, no doubt, in
fancying that Corona had deserted him. But he had already suffered a
loss, in Maria Consuelo, which had at the time seemed the greatest
conceivable, and the pain he had suffered then, together with, the deep
though, unacknowledged wound to his vanity, had predisposed him to
believe that he was destined to be friendless. The consequence was that
a very slight break in the perfect understanding which had so long
existed between him and his mothe