The Cardinal's small gleaming eyes met his with the fearlessness of superiority.
"I remember nothing but good of your Eminence," the painter replied at last, with a laugh; and applying himself to his work, he began to draw in the outline of the Cardinal's head.

The words he had just heard, implying as they did a thorough knowledge of the minutest details of social life, would have terrified Madame Mayer, and would perhaps have driven Del Ferice out of the Papal States in fear of his life.

Even the good-natured and foolish Valdarno might reasonably have been startled; but Anastase was made of different stuff.

His grandfather had helped to storm the Bastille, his father had been among the men of 1848; there was revolutionary blood in his veins, and he distinguished between real and imaginary conspiracy with the unerring certainty of instinct, as the bloodhound knows the track of man from the slot of meaner game.

He laughed at Donna Tullia, he distrusted Del Ferice, and to some extent he understood the Cardinal.