beginnings, and she had played there as a child. However, she had never been regularly asked with Gheta; and when that occurred—Gheta indifferently delivered Anna Mantegazza's message—and her mother acquiesced, Lavinia had a renewed sense of her growing importance.
She went out early, in the heat of midday, a time that fitted best with the involved schedule of the Sanvianos' single equipage—Anna would take her sister directly from a luncheon at the Ginoris'. Lavinia looked with mingled anticipation and relief at the approaching graceful façade added scarcely a hundred and fifty years before to the otherwise somber abode of the Mantegazzas, first established in the twelfth century.
The villa stood on an eminence, circled by austere pines, and terraced with innumerable vegetable gardens and frugally planted olives. The road mounted abruptly, turned under a frowning wall incongruously topped with delicately painted urns, and doubled across the massive iron-bound door that closed the arched entrance. Within, an immensely high timbered hall was pleasantly cool and dark after the white blaze without. It was bare of furnishing except for a number of rude oak settles against the naked stone walls. It had been a place of fear to Lavinia when a child; and even now she left it with a sense of relief for the modernized interior beyond.
Pier Mantegazza was standing before a high inclined table, which bore a number of blackened and shapeless medallions. He was a famous numismatic—a tall stooping man, slightly lame, and enveloped in a premature gray ill health that resembled clinging cobwebs. He bent and brushed Lavinia's forehead with his crisp mustache,
