awberries, mingled with the most delicate and almost imperceptible
variations of white, from the immaculate purity of freshly fallen snow
to the indefinable shades of new milk, the sap of the reed, dull silver,
alabaster and opal.

'It is a _festa_ to-day,' she said, her laughing face appearing over the
flowers that covered her whole bosom up to the throat.

'Thanks! Thanks!' Andrea cried again and again as he helped her to empty
the mass of bloom on to the table, all over the books and papers and
portfolios--'_Rosa rosarum!_'

Her hands once free, she proceeded to collect all the vases in the room
and fill them with roses, arranging each cluster with rare artistic
skill. While she did so, she talked of a thousand things with her usual
blithe volubility, almost as if compensating herself for the parsimony
of words and laughter she had exercised up till now, out of regard for
Andrea's taciturn melancholy.

Presently she remarked, 'On the 15th we expect a beautiful guest, Donna
Maria Ferres y Capdevila, the wife of the Plenipotentiary for Guatemala.
Do you know her?'

'I think not,'

'No, I do not suppose you could. She only returned to Italy a few months
ago, but she will spend next winter in Rome because her husband has been
appointed to that post. She is a very dear friend of mine--we knew each
other as children, and were three years together at the Convent of the
Annunciation in Florence. She is younger than I am.'

'Is she an American?'

'No, an Italian. She is from Sienna. She comes of the Bandinelli family,
and was baptized with water from the "Fonte Gaja." For all that, she is
rather melancholy by nature, but very sweet. The story of her marriage
is not a very cheerful one. Ferres is a most unsympathetic person.
However, they have a little girl--a perfect darling--you will see; a
little white face with enormous eyes and masses of dark hair. She is
very like her mother--Look, Andrea, is not that rose just like velvet?
And this--I could eat it--look--it is like glorified cream. How
delicious!'

She went on picking out the different roses and chatting pleasantly. A
wave of perfume, intoxicating as century-old wine, streamed from the
massed flowers; some of the petals dropped and hung in the folds of
Francesca's gown; beneath the window the dark shaft of a cypress pierced
the golden sunshine, and through Andrea's memory ran persistently, like
a phrase of music, a line from Petrarch:--

_'Cosi partia le ro