Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/80

Rh on wing in stately architectare, and numbered ninety chambers.

He was admitted, and entered the house, lighted with a flood of light, crowded with a glittering suite of attendants of all grades, and seemingly endless in its vastness, with chamber and corridor opening out one on another in wearying succession of splendour, relieved from monotony, however, by the exquisite pieces of sculpture and of painting that studded the whole like a second Pitti. Some thirty of these corridors and reception-rooms ended in a little chamber, small at least by comparison, hung with purple velvet, its furniture of silver and of ebony, its only painting a superb Ecce Homo of Leonardo's, its windows narrow and lancet-shaped, the whole now illumined with a soft amber light;—this was the sanctuary of Monsignore Villaflor. Monsignore rose with aflfability—he was ever affable—and advanced with courtly grace. Monsignore was a handsome and portly man, with the beautiful Neapolitan eyes and the beautiful Neapolitan face; a little losing the symmetry of his figure now, and over his fiftieth year, but a very noble person still. He wore the violet robes of a bishop, and on his hand sparkled the bishop's amethyst ring.