"I cannot speak English, or read it."

Evidently, the man was not going to talk. To me the entire situation was most interesting. Same servants, same villa, many masters. They came and bought and wrote on the wall and left, and then my real-estate friend sold the house again. A fine racket!

Downstairs, outdoors, under the grapevine, eating a good Italian meal, looking at the wonderful view, I came to laugh at my suspicions. I ate spaghetti, olives, dark bread and wine. Silence hung heavily over the sullen sleepy afternoon. The sky became copper-colored. It was about to rain. The old man came and showed me a place to put my car, a recess in the wall of the house, open at one end, but sheltered from the weather. The stone floor was black with grease; more than one automobile had been kept there.

"Other cars have been here," I ventured.

"All the masters had cars," the old man replied.

Back on the stone gallery I waited for the storm to break. At last it came in a solid wall of gray wetness across the valley. Nearer and nearer it came till it deluged my villa and drove me inside.

The woman was lighting candles. I took one from her hand.

"I want to look through the house," I explained.

She made no protest; so I started exploring the first floor. One room was evidently the sleeping-quarters for the servants; another was the kitchen, and the remaining two might have served in the old days for dining-room and drawing-room. There was little furniture, and the walls were gray with time and mold. One flight of stone stairs led upward to the bedroom, another to the cellar. I decided to go downstairs.

They were steps, not made of masonry, but apparently carved out of the living rock. The cellar was simply a cubical hole in the mountain. It all looked very old. I had the uneasy feeling that originally that cellar had been a tomb and that later the house had been built over it. But, once at the bottom, there was nothing to indicate a sepulcher. A few small casks of wine, some junk, odds of rope and rusty iron, those were in the corners; otherwise, the room was empty, and dusty.

"It is an odd room," I commented to myself. It seemed in some way out of place and out of shape and size for the villa above it. I had expected something more, something larger, gloomier. Walking around, I 

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