still, to the end, the family he had served faithfully, honestly and
hopelessly for upwards of a third of a century. That might seem to be
inconsistent, but it was the only consistency he had ever known, and
it was loyalty, of a kind.

But there was one whom he wished back for her own sake; there was
Donna Sabina. When he thought of her, his hands fell from his head at
last, and folded themselves over the scrawled figures on the big sheet
of paper, and he looked long and steadily at them, without seeing them
at all.

He wondered what would become of her. He had seen her on the last day
and he should never forget it. Before going away with the Baroness
Volterra she had found her way to his dark office, and had stood a few
moments before the shabby old table, with a small package in her hand.
He could see the slight figure still, when he closed his eyes, and her
misty hair against the cold light of the window. She had come to ask
him if he would bury her dead canary, somewhere under the sky where
there was grass and it would not be disturbed. Where could she bury
it, down in the heart of Rome? She had wrapped it in a bit of pink
satin and had laid it in a little brown cardboard box which had been
full of chocolates from Ronzi and Singer's in Piazza Colonna. She
pushed back the lid a finger's breadth and he saw the pink satin for a
second. She laid the box before him. Would he please do what she
asked? Very timidly she slipped a simple little ring off her finger,
one of those gold ones with the sacred monogram which foreigners
insist upon calling "Pax." She said she had bought it with her own
money, and could give it away. She wished to give it to him. He
protested, refused, but the fathomless violet eyes gazed into his very
reproachfully. He had always been so kind to her, she said; would he