"A packet, my lady, which was left early this
morning before any of your ladyship's women
were up. Porter Bindo has just given it to me.
The bearer said that he was instructed not to
wait for any answer."

The duchess looked at the large coarse writing
of the superscription, and concluded that the
envelope contained the petition of some mendicant
for charity. She felt but little inclined at
that moment to do aught to relieve the sorrows
of any human being. She tore off the cover, with
a savage satisfaction at the prospect of an opportunity
of revenging, even on an unknown beggar,
the smart which made her at enmity with all the
world; and read greedily, breathlessly, while a
ghastly paleness spread itself over her face, and
her heart seemed to suspend its action. She had
read but the first line or two, when, with a
ferocious and cruel smile, her fingers clutched
the little miniature in its case, and closed over it
with a grasp as convulsing as if the throat of her
enemy were beneath their pressure. But the
letter was read with the intensest avidity to the
last word. The miserable woman then let it fall
from her hands, and threw herself backward on
the cushion of the large chair in which she sat,
while the violent heaving of her bosom, the rapid
contraction and distension of her nostrils, and
the rush of the returning blood to brow, cheek,
and neck, indicated the agony of passion that
swept over her like a tempest wind. And all the
while she held the fatal portrait at arm's length
before her, staring at the unopened case, which
she seemed to lack courage to unclose.

By degrees the violence of the storm in her
blood and brain subsided to a treacherous calm,
and she remained for a few minutes as if lost
in abstraction. Then silently motioning her
women to leave her, she glanced round her as
they left the chamber, as if to be sure that she
was indeed alone, and then with a sudden
spring forward, rapid and fierce as the bound of
a tigress on its prey, she tore open the case of
the picture, and fixing her distended eyes on
the beautiful face in the pride of its youthful
bloom, remained staring at it, as if it had blasted
her sight like the head of a Medusa. Once again
all the blood ran back to her bursting heart, as
she gazed, and left a ghastly and livid paleness
on her features, reflected in the glass before
her in horrible contrast to the soft peach-bloom
on the lovely girlish face in the fatal
picture.

Notable was the difference of the effect produced
in the two women, the Duchess Veronica
and the Countess Cecilia, by the comparison of
their features with the disastrous beauty of that
same portrait which had been made by each of
them. No illusion softened to the despairing
wife the truth of her discomfiture. The stake in
her case was too tremendously great to permit
any self-love or vanity to conceal for an instant the
blasting truth. It was with her no mere triumph
of coquetry, no itch for admiration, no question of
whistling back a fickle lover to the lightly-worn
allegiance of an hour. It was her all, her life, the
wreck of heart and soul that were doomed by the
fatal beauty of those girlish features.

She began walking rapidly to and fro across
the large chamber, muttering from time to
time:

"Not this! no! it shall not be .... I, the
daughter of a princely line! .... sweep her
from my path, as I spurn her image"
and she dashed to the other end of the floor with
her foot the miniature, as she passed it in her
walk;".... robbed of my husband's love by a
peasant in right of a painted cheek
Caterina Canacci! beware, beware! Be warned!
.... Yes; so it shall be," she continued, after
a long pause, during which she had ceased from
her hurried walk, and stood deep in thought;
"so it shall be! There shall be a warning. There
shall be yet a door for repentance opened both
to him and to her!"

With these words she recommenced her walk
somewhat more calmly. But the thin bloodless
lips were closely compressed; there was a dangerous
gleam in the fierce hard eyes, heavy gloom
upon the lowering brow. And for several hours
she continued thus apparently in deep thought.
* * * * * *

About three weeks later in the year, towards
the latter end of November, a little after the hour
of the Ave Maria, the thick dusty cloud-curtain
of two centuries rises on the next scene of this
drama, as the contemporary diarists and chroniclers
have preserved it for us.

Very few of the many thousand visitors of all
nations who every year pass under Vasari's fine
colonnade of the " Uffizi," on their way to the
world-famous gallery above it, are aware that
between the entrance nearest the Palazzo
Vecchio and the door at the foot of the grand
stair leading to the gallery, they pass the former
entrance of one of the oldest, and once one of the
most famous, churches in Florence. Many Florentines
even, whose whole lives have been
passed within the walls of their native city,
would be unable to tell, if asked, the where-about
of the once celebrated church of St. Peter
the Greater, otherwise called San Pietro in
Scheraggio, or St. Peter in the Ditch. Yet if
Dante had been told that a day would come
when a stranger might ask in vain his way in
Florence to San Pietro Scheraggio, he might
have replied, perhaps, that the time might well
come, nay, not improbably was at hand, when
Florence should become even as Babylon, by
reason of the wickedness of its people; but it
assuredly would have appeared incredible to him
that a free Tuscan senate should be sitting in the
council-hall of the almost adjoining palace, not a
few of whose members would have been puzzled to
point out the site of one of the principal churches
and monasteries of the city, still in part existing
almost within a hundred yards of them. But
Messer Giorgio Vasari, when planning for his
patron Cosmo the building of the new "Uifizi,"
which was to contain and reunite all the "offices"