guardian, the excellent Baron Goldbirn,
had bought it for her because it was offered for sale at a low price,
and was an excellent investment as well as a treasure of art; and he had
purposed to coat the brown stone walls with fresh stucco, to erect a
"belvedere" with nice green blinds on the roof, to hang the rooms with
rich magenta damask, to carpet them with Brussels carpets, to furnish
them with gilt furniture, to warm the house with steam heat, and to
light it with electricity.

To his surprise, his ward rejected each of these proposals in detail and
all of them generally, and declared that since the villa was hers she
could deal with it according to her own taste, which, she maintained,
was better than Goldbirn's. The latter answered that as he was
sixty-five years old and Cecilia was only eighteen, this was impossible;
but that under the circumstances he washed his hands of the matter, only
warning her that the Italian law would not allow her to cut down the
trees more than once in nine years.

"As if anything could induce me to cut them down at all!" Cecilia
answered indignantly. "There are few enough as it is!"

"My dear," the Countess had answered with admirable relevancy, "I hope
you are not ungrateful to your guardian."

Cecilia was not ungrateful, but she had her own way, for it was
preordained that she generally should, and it was well for the Villa
Madama that it was so. She only asked her guardian how much he would
allow her to spend on the place, and then, to his amazement and
satisfaction, she only spent half the sum he named. She easily persuaded
a good artist, whom her stepfather had helped at the beginning of his
career, to take charge of the work, and it was carried out with loving
and reverent taste. The wilderness of sloping land became a garden, the
beautiful "court of honour" was so skilfully restored with old stone and
brick that the restoration could hardly be detected, the great exterior
staircase was rebuilt, the close garden on the other side was made a
carpet of flowers; the water that gushed abundantly from a deep spring
in the hillside poured into an old fountain bought from the remains of a
villa in the Campagna, and then, below, filled the vast square basin
that already existed, and thence it was distributed through the lower
grounds. There were roses everywhere, already beginning to climb, and
the scent of a few young orange trees in blossom mingled delicately with
the odour of