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alarmingly short with a razor, and blown dry in a matter of half an hour. When it was done she looked completely different. She would have been hard put to it to have recognised herself in a crowd. It was very stylish and completely feminine, framing her face with a softness that her long hair had never given her. Then her eye caught sight of the prices they were to be charged for the transformation and she visibly blenched.
    'I can't think what my father will say!' she exclaimed, She turned her head to look up at Domenico. 'He is going to pay, isn't he?'
    'Of course.'
    'I think I ought to thank you all the same,' she said. 'Do you think I look nice?'
    Amusement tugged at the corners of his lips. 'Very nice.'
    They left the establishment in a glow of mutual goodwill. Not that he was going to have his own way in everything, Deborah mentally decided, but it pleased her to know as certainly as if he had told her so that he too was surprised at how well it had turned out and that he was looking at her with a new respect and significance. Before his very eyes she was turning from a pretty girl into a very lovely woman. There were dangers attached to that, Deborah suspected, but she couldn't bring herself to regret the transformation whatever might happen to her in the future.
    Coming out of the hairdressers, Domenico took her arm and led her down towards the river.
    'There is something here I want to show you,' he said. 'You remember I asked you if you had ever heard of the Mouth of Truth?'
    'Yes, but I don't know anything about it. I told you I didn't.'
    'It has a charming legend. If you put your hand in the mouth and tell a lie it will nip your fingers.'
    Deborah put her hands behind her back. 'I'd like to see it '
    'But you're not going to try it out?'
    She shook her head. 'I don't know what you may ask me. I might not want to tell the truth—not to you,' she said.
    'At least you don't mock such an ancient institution! There was a man who did so, way back in the eighteenth century, and he put his hand in the mouth and was stung by a scorpion.'
    Deborah's eyes opened wide. 'Did he die of it?'
    Domenico shrugged. 'History doesn't relate. I doubt he mocked La Bocca della Verita again.'
    'No,' Deborah agreed with feeling. 'Have you ever tried it out yourself?'
    'Never personally. Through the years my family have been known to make use of it to test the virtue of their wives. It has never been known to fail to detect an adulteress, which has always been the most popular test to which it has been put.'
    Deborah shivered. 'Were the penalties very severe?' she asked. 'They can't have loved their wives much to put them to such a test.'
    'Ah, but in those days it was a terrible disgrace to be cheated by one's wife. Suppose I had not been my father's son? Should I then have inherited his place in society and his possessions?'
    'I don't know,' she admitted.
    He smiled at her serious tone. 'Nowadays it's a joke, no more than that, piccina . Besides, it has never been known to punish the innocent!'
    He led the way into the portico of St Mary in Cosmedin, one of the gems of medieval Rome. Deborah judged the austere but charming interior to date from about the eighth century, but she was not the expert that Michael was in ecclesiastical architecture. The Romanesque bell-tower was much later but, she thought, equally charming.
    The Mouth of Truth stood on the left-hand side of the portico. Some time in its history a third of it had broken away and it had been cemented back together again, giving the marble mask a sinister look it had probably not had originally.
    'What was it in the beginning?' she asked Domenico.
    'A drain cover. Before there was a church here there was a temple dedicated to Ceres. Who knows all that the face has seen in the past?'
    Deborah touched the nose and the flaring nostrils, carefully avoiding the entrance to the mouth. 'It's a pagan thing to have in a church,' she remarked.
    'We're a pagan people.'
    'Are you?' She