been begun at
the date from which I now take up my story.

The neighbourhood is a lonely one, but there are farm-houses scattered
about at varying distances from the high-road which follows the river,
mostly in the neighbourhood of the hill that bears the name of
Monteverde and seems to have been the site of a villa in which Julius
Caesar entertained Cleopatra.

As every one will understand, Ugo Severi's duties consisted in keeping
an account of the ammunition and explosives deposited in the vaults of
the magazine and in exercising the utmost vigilance against fire and
other accidents. The rule against smoking, for instance, did not apply
outside the enclosure, but Ugo gave up cigarettes, even in his own
house, as soon as he was appointed to the post, and took care that
every one should know that he had done so.

He was a hard-working, hard-reading, rather melancholic man who had
never cared much for society and preferred solitude to a club; a fair
man, with the face of a student and not over robust, but nevertheless
energetic and determined where his duty was concerned. He lived alone
in the little house, with his orderly, a clever Sicilian, who cooked
for him; a peasant woman from a neighbouring farm-house came every
morning to sweep the rooms, make the two beds, and scrub the two stone
steps before the door and clean the kitchen.

The house was like hundreds of other little houses in the Campagna. On
the ground floor there was a cross-vaulted hall where the Captain
transacted business and received the reports of the watch; there was a
tiny kitchen also, a stable at the back for two horses, and a narrow
chamber adjoining it, in which Pica, the orderly, slept. Upstairs
there was only one story, consisting of a large room with a loggia
looking across the river towards San Paolo, a bedroom of moderate
dimensions, and a dressing-room.

The place was more luxuriously furnished than might have been
expected, for though Captain Ugo was not a rich man, he was by no
means dependent on his pay. General Severi had lived to retrieve a
part of his fortune, and had died rather suddenly of heart-failure
after a bad attack of influenza, leaving his property to be divided
equally between his two surviving sons and their sister. The latter
had married away from Rome, and Ugo's younger brother was in the navy,
so that he was now the only member of his family left in Rome.

He was a man of taste and reading, who had entered the a