Chapter 22 - Page 2

for it had a wide, high door, which now stood open into the
tangled garden behind; and the tall iron lattices admitted on
occasion more than enough of the Italian sunshine. It was
moreover a seat of ease, indeed of luxury, telling of
arrangements subtly studied and refinements frankly proclaimed,
and containing a variety of those faded hangings of damask and
tapestry, those chests and cabinets of carved and time-polished
oak, those angular specimens of pictorial art in frames as
pedantically primitive, those perverse-looking relics of medieval
brass and pottery, of which Italy has long been the not quite
exhausted storehouse. These things kept terms with articles of
modern furniture in which large allowance had been made for a
lounging generation; it was to be noticed that all the chairs
were deep and well padded and that much space was occupied by a
writing-table of which the ingenious perfection bore the stamp of
London and the nineteenth century. There were books in profusion
and magazines and newspapers, and a few small, odd, elaborate
pictures, chiefly in water-colour. One of these productions stood
on a drawing-room easel before which, at the moment we begin to
be concerned with her, the young girl I have mentioned had placed
herself. She was looking at the picture in silence.

Silence--absolute silence--had not fallen upon her companions;
but their talk had an appearance of embarrassed continuity. The
two good sisters had not settled themselves in their respective
chairs; their attitude expressed a final reserve and their faces
showed the glaze of prudence. They were plain, ample,
mild-featured women, with a kind of business-like modesty to
which the impersonal aspect of their stiffened linen and of the
serge that draped them as if nailed on frames gave an advantage.
One of them, a person of a certain age, in spectacles, with a
fresh complexion and a full cheek, had a more discriminating
manner than her colleague, as well as the responsibility of their
errand, which apparently related to the young girl. This object
of interest wore her hat--an ornament of extreme simplicity and
not at variance with her plain muslin gown, too short for her
years, though it must already have been "let out." The gentleman
who might have been supposed to be entertaining the two nuns was
perhaps conscious of the difficulties of his function, it being
in its way as arduous to converse with the very meek as with the
very mighty. At the same time he was clearly much occupied with
their quiet charge, and while she turned her back to him his eyes
rested gravely on her slim, small figure. He was a man of forty,
with a high but well-shaped head, on which the hair, still dense,
but prematurely grizzled,