in Sicily. On the walls were pictures, each one a world of thought and of beauty. The Grecian landscapes of Gaspar Poussin, who delighted in the graceful nymph, and the marble fane which recalled a mythology all poetry, as if in his dreams he had dwelt in Thessaly. The rugged scenes which Salvator Rosa loved to delineate—the forest, dark with impenetrable depths; the bare and jagged rock, rough as if nature had forgotten it; the aged pine riven by the lightning, and beside it some bandit, desolate and stricken as the tree by which he stood, but with a cruel defiance in his looks, as though he longed to resent all the injuries he had received from a few. Near at hand hung one of the glad earths and sunny skies in which the more buoyant spirit of Claude Lorraine revelled, as if its native element were sunshine. There were portraits too, the noble and the beautiful of her race; faces which told a whole history—and yet Lolah marked them not.
But one twelvemonth had she been a bride, and her husband's presence was unfamiliar to his home. Day after day did some unkind friend—for when do friends not delight in the sorrow of the prosperous?—come to her with tales how the Count's wealth was lavished on others less lovely than herself. And even that very evening had her father been with her, telling her that no wealth could hold out against Leoni's reckless prodigality—against his mad passion for gaming. In pity to the gentle creature, who could only lean on his bosom and weep, he
