A fortnight later, Signora Cecca walked sulkily down the narrow staircase of the handsome Englishman\'s little studio. Signora Cecca was evidently indulging herself in the cheap luxury of a very bad humour. To an Italian woman of Cecca\'s peculiarly imperious temperament, indulgence in that congenial exercise of the spleen may be looked upon as a real and genuine luxury. Cecca brooded over her love and her wrath and her jealousy as thwarted children brood over their wrongs in the solitude of the bedroom where they have been sent to expiate some small everyday domestic offence in silence and loneliness. The handsome Englishman had then a sweetheart, an innamorata, in his own country, clearly; and now she had come to Rome, the perfidious creature, on purpose to visit him. That was a contingency that Cecca had never for one moment counted upon when she left her native village in Calabria and followed the unknown sculptor obediently to Rome, where she rose at once to be the acknowledged queen of the artists\' models.

Not that Cecca had ever seriously thought, on her own part, of marrying Colin. Mother of heaven, no! for the handsome Englishman was a heretic and a foreigner; and to marry him would have been utterly shocking to all Cecca\'s deepest and most ingrained moral and religious feelings. For Cecca was certainly by no means devoid of principle. She would have stuck a knife into you in a quarrel as soon as look at you: she would have poisoned a rival remorselessly in cold blood under the impelling influence of treacherous Italian jealousy without a moment\'s hesitation, but she would have decidedly drawn a sharp line at positively marrying a foreigner and a heretic. No, she didn\'t want to marry Colin. But she wanted to keep him to herself as her own private and particular possession: she wanted to have him for her own without external interference: she wanted to prevent all other women from having anything to say or to do with her own magnificent handsome Englishman. He needn\'t marry her, of course, but he certainly mustn\'t be allowed to go and marry any other woman.

\'If I were a jealous fool,\' Cecca thought to herself in her own vigorous Calabrian patois, \'I should run away and leave him outright, and make Bazzoni\'s fortune all at once by letting him model from me. But I\'m not a jealous fool, and I don\'t want, as the proverb says, to cut off my own right hand merely in order to fling it in the face of my rival. The English signorina loves the handsome Englishman—that\'s certain. Then, mother of God, the English signorina will have to pay for it. Dear little Madonna della Guardia, help me to cook her stew for her, and you shall have tapers, ever so many tapers, and a couple of masses too in your own little chapel on the headland at Monteleone. There is no Madonna so helpful at a pinch as our own Madonna della Guardia at Monteleone. Besides, she isn\'t too particular. She will give you her aid on an emergency, and not be so very angry with you after all, because you\'ve had to go a little bit out of your way, perhaps, to effect your purpose. Blood of St. Elmo, no: she took candles from the good uncle when he shot the carabiniere who came to take him up over the affair of the ransom of the American traveller; and she protected him well for the candles too, and he has never been arrested for it even to this very minute.

The English signorina had better look out, by Bacchus, if she wants to meddle with Cecca Bianchelli and Madonna della Guardia at Monteleone. Besides, she\'s nothing but a heretic herself, if it comes to that, so what on earth, I should like to know, do the blessed saints in heaven care for her?\'

Signora Cecca stood still for a moment in the middle of the Via Colonna, and asked herself this question passionately, with a series of gesticulations which in England might possibly have excited unfavourable attention. For example, she set her teeth hard together, and drew an imaginary knife deliberately across the throat of an equally imaginary aerial rival. But in Rome, where people are used to gesticulations, nobody took the slightest notice of them.

\'She has been four times to the studio already,\' Signora Cecca went on to herself, resuming her homeward walk as quietly as if nothing at all had intervened to diversify it: \'and every time she comes the handsome Englishman talks to her, makes love to her, fondles her almost before my very eyes. And she, the basilisk, she loves him too, though she pretends to be so very coy and particular: she loves him: she cannot deceive me: I saw it at once, and I see it still through all her silly trans............