bidden or forbidden to ascend. The ground floor and the
upper floor of that battered house are alike deserted, and
the inmates keep the central portion, just as in a dying
body all life retires to the heart. There is a door at the
top of the first flight of stairs, and if the visitor is
admitted he will find a welcome which is not necessarily
cold. There are several rooms, some dark and mostly
stuffy--a reception-room adorned with horsehair chairs,
wool-work stools, and a stove that is never lit--German bad
taste without German domesticity broods over that room; also
a living-room, which insensibly glides into a bedroom when
the refining influence of hospitality is absent, and real
bedrooms; and last, but not least, the loggia, where you can
live day and night if you feel inclined, drinking vermouth
and smoking cigarettes, with leagues of olive-trees and
vineyards and blue-green hills to watch you.

It was in this house that the brief and inevitable
tragedy of Lilia's married life took place. She made Gino
buy it for her, because it was there she had first seen him
sitting on the mud wall that faced the Volterra gate. She
remembered how the evening sun had struck his hair, and how
he had smiled down at her, and being both sentimental and
unrefined, was determined to have the man and the place
together. Things in Italy are cheap for an Italian, and,
though he would have preferred a house in the piazza, or
better still a house at Siena, or, bliss above bliss, a
house at Leghorn, he did as she asked, thinking that perhaps
she showed her good taste in preferring so retired an abode.