SIX SUNNY MONTHS.

SIX SUNNY MONTHS.BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC.CHAPTERVI.BIANCA’S FESTA.Bianca’sbirthday coming, they celebrated it by a little trip into the country. It was getting late for excursions, the weather being hot even for the last of May. But on the day before the proposed journey a few ragged clouds, scudding now and then across the sky, promised refreshment. Clouds never come to Rome for nothing; even the smallest fugitive mist is a herald; and the family, therefore, looked anxiously to see if they were to be kept at home the next day—if the herald announced a royal progress, short and splendid, or a long siege of rainy days.They were sauntering, late in the afternoon, through a street of the Suburra, on one of those aimless walks that hit the mark of pleasure far oftener than planned pleasure-seeking does, and, seeing at their left a steep grade that ended in a stair climbing through light and shadow up the hillside, and going out under a dark arch into the light again, they followed it without asking questions, and presently found themselves in a quietpiazzasurrounded by churches and convents as silent and, apparently, uninhabited as a desert. The most living thing was a single lofty palm-tree that leaned out against the sky. A wall hid the base of it, where one would not have been surprised to have found a lion sleeping.Entering the portico of the nearestchurch, they saw what might have been taken for two ancient, mossy statues, seated one at either side of the door, one representing a man as ragged and gray as Rip Van Winkle after his nap, the other a woman well fitted to be his companion. The statues stirred, however, at the sound of steps, extended their withered hands, and commenced a sort of gabbling appeal, in which nothing was distinguishable but the inevitablequalche cosa.Inside the church, beside the beautiful Presence indicated by the ever-burning lamp, there was but one person, a gigantic man, all white, who sat leaning forward a little, with the fingers of his right hand tangled in his beard. They saw him gazing, almost glaring, at them across the church as they seated themselves near the door after a short adoration. The painted roof invited their eyes to glimpses of heaven, the tribune walls shone with the story ofSt.Peter liberated by an angel, and the antique columns told of pagan emperors whom they had served before they were raised to hold a canopy over the head of the King of kings; but through them all, becoming every moment more importunate and terrible, the stare of those motionless, stony eyes drew theirs with an uncomfortable fascination, and the figure seemed to lean more forward, as if about to stride toward them,and the fingers to move in the beard, as if longing to catch and toss them out of the church.“He appears to resent our not saluting him,” Mr. Vane said. “I do not need an introduction. Suppose we go to him before he comes clattering down the nave to us!”They rose, and, with a diffidence amounting almost to fear, went up the aisle to pay their respects to Michael Angelo’sMoses.“O Mr. Vane!” the Signora whispered, suddenly touching his arm, “does he look as if he went up the mountain to bring down Protestantism?”She said it impulsively, and was ashamed of herself the next moment. He was not offended, however, but smiled slightly, and, feeling the touch, drew her hand into his arm. “He doesn’t look like a man who would carry any sort ofismabout long.”He was looking at theMosesas he spoke; but he felt the dissatisfaction which the lady at his side did not indicate by word or motion, and added after a moment: “It must be owned that Protestantism has reduced the stone tables to dust, and that your church is the only one that has graven laws.”She did not venture to press him any farther. The question with him, then, was evidently whether graven laws were necessary. He was not at all likely to write his faith in the dust of the sects.“It is the most uncomfortable marble person in Rome,” she said of theMoses. “I always have a feeling that it is never quite still; that he has turned his face on being interrupted in something, as if he had been talking with God here alone, and were waiting for people to go and leave him to continue the conversation. He will watch usout the door, though. I wonder if he can see through the leathern curtain? Come, little girls, we are going.”Bianca had a rose in her belt, and, as the others walked slowly away, she slipped across the church and threw it inside the railing before the Blessed Sacrament, repeating from the Canticle ofSt.Francis of Assisi, which they had been reading with their Italian teacher the evening before:“Laudate sia il mio Signor per la nostraMadre terra, la qualeCi sostenta, e nudrisce col produrreTanta diversitàD’erba, di fiori e frutti.”“They speak of the Blessed Sacrament here asIl Santissimo,” she heard the Signora say when she joined them at the door. “It is beautiful; but I prefer the Spanish title of ‘His Majesty.’ One would like to be able to ask, on entering a church, ‘At which altar is His Majesty?’ It sounds like a live faith. Isn’t that palm beautiful? And do you see the ghost of Lucretia Borgia up in her balcony there? That is, or was, her balcony. Dear me! what an uncanny afternoon it is. I quite long to get among common people.”In fact, a solid post of snow-white cloud showed like a motionless figure over the balcony, changing neither shape nor position while they looked at it. There was, evidently, something behind worth seeing, and they took a carriage to the Janiculum for a better view. When they reached the parapet of San Pietro in Montorio, they saw the horizon beyond the city bound by a wonderful mountain-range—not the accustomed Sabine Apennines and Monte Cimino; these had disappeared, and over their places rose a solid magnificence of cloud thatmade the earth and sky look unstable. Ruby peaks splintered here and there against the blue in sharp pinnacles, their sides cleft into gorges of fine gold, their bases wrapped about with the motionless smoke and flame of a petrified conflagration. Beneath all were rough masses of uneasy darkness, in which could be seen faintly the throb of a pulse of fire. The royal progress had begun, and promised to be a costly one to some. The poor farmers would have to pay, at least.They leaned on the parapet, and took a new lesson in shape and color from the inexhaustible skies, and the Signora told them one of the many legends of the Janiculum.“It is said that after the Flood Noe came here to live, held in high honor, as we may well imagine, by his descendants. As time passed, after his death, the truth became mixed with error, and the patriarch Noe became the god Janus, with two faces, because he had seen the old world and the new. So all antique truth, left to human care, became corrupted little by little. It was only when the Holy Spirit came down to stay on earth that truth could be preserved unadulterated. ‘Teaching you all truth.’ Am I preaching? Excuse me!”Turning her face, as she spoke slowly and dreamily, she had found Mr. Vane looking at her with a steady and grave regard which did not evade, but lingered an instant, when it met hers. She recollected that he had not her faith, and thought he might be displeased a little at having alien doctrines so constantly held up before him.On the contrary, he was admiring her fair, pale face, which the glowing west and a glowing thought were tinting with soft rose, and wasthinking he had never known a woman who so habitually lived in a high atmosphere, who so easily gathered about her the beauties of the past and the present, and who had so little gossip to talk. When she descended to trifling things, it was to invest them with a charm that made them worthy of notice as pretty and interesting trifles, but never to elevate them to places they were not made for. Besides, he liked her way of talking—a certain cool sweetness of manner, like the sweetness of a rose, that touched those who came near, but was not awakened by their presence, and would be as sweet were no one by to know. He glanced at her again when she was again looking off thoughtfully into the west, and marked the light touch with gold the strands of a braid that crowned her head under the violet wreath. She was certainly a very lovely woman, he thought. Why had she never married?For, though we call her Signora, the Vanes’padronawas, in fact, asignorina.“Well, what is it?” she asked smilingly, turning again, aware of his eyes. She was one of those persons who always feel the stress of another mind brought to bear on them. “You should tell me what it is.”The two girls had gone to a little distance, and he ventured to put the question.“It is an impertinence,” he said hastily, “but I was wondering why you never married. You are thirty-five years old, and have had time and opportunities. If you command me to ask no more, I shall not blame you.”“It is not an impertinence,” she replied quite easily. “There is no tragedy hidden behind my ‘maidenmeditation.’ The simple truth is that I have never had an offer from any one whom I could willingly or possibly promise to love, honor, and obey for my whole life, though I have refused some with regret; and if I have known any person to whom I could have so devoted myself, no approach on his part and no consciousness on mine have ever revealed the fact to me. My mind and life were always full. My mother taught me to love books and nature, and said nothing about marriage. There is nothing like having plenty to think of. Are you satisfied?”“Perfectly,” he replied, but seemed not altogether pleased. Perhaps he would have found a less self-sufficing woman more interesting and amiable. “Still, I beg your pardon for a question which, after all, no one should ask. One never knows what may have happened in a life.”“That is true,” she replied. “And it is true that the question might be to some an embarrassing one to answer. It does not hurt me, however.”“Papa does not allow us to ask questions,” Isabel said a little complainingly, having caught a few words of their talk. “You have no idea how sharply he will speak to us, or, at least, look at us, if he hears us asking the simplest question that can be at all personal. And yet people question us unmercifully. I think one might retort in self-defence.”“How I wish you could have a larger number of pupils than these two, Mr. Vane!” the Signora sighed. “I would like to send some of my lady friends to school to you. The questions that some ladies, who consider themselves well bred, will ask, are astonishing. Indeed, there is, I think, more vulgarity in finesociety than among any other class of people in the world. Delicacy and refinement are flowers that need a little shade to keep their freshness. I have more than once been shocked to see, in a momentary revelation, how slight was the difference of character between a bold, unscrupulous virago of the streets, and some fine lady when an unpleasant excitement had disturbed the thin polish of manner with which she was coated. Madame de Montespan—not a model by any means, though—relates that, when she came to Paris to be trained for polite life, among the admonitions and prohibitions, one of the strongest was that she must not ask questions. Not long ago, on thinking over a conversation I had with a lady whom I had known just three weeks, I found that these questions had been propounded to me in the course of it: How old are you? Who visits you? What is your income? Have you any money laid up? Have you sold your last story? To whom have you sold it? How much do they pay you? Is it paid for? Of course the lady was fitting herself to speak with authority of my affairs.”The Signora made an impatient motion of the shoulders, as if throwing off a disagreeable burden. “How did we fall into this miserable subject? Let us walk about awhile and shake it off. We might go into the church and say a little prayer for poor Beatrice Cenci, who is buried here. One glance at Piombo’sScourging of Christ, one thought of that girl’s terrible tragedy, will scorch out these petty thoughts, if one breath of the Lord’s presence should not blow them away.”She hurried up the steps and ran into the church, as one soiled anddusty with travel rushes into a bath. Coming out again, they strolled back into the gardens, and looked off over the green sea of the luxuriant Campagna, whereSt.Paul’s Church floated like an ark, half swamped in verdure and flowers, and a glistening bend of the Tiber bound the fragrantly breathing groves like a girdle, the bridge across it a silver buckle. Beneath the wall that stopped their feet a grassy angle of the villa beyond was red with poppies growing on their tall stems in the shade. So everywhere in Italy the faithful soil commemorates the blood of the martyrs that has been sprinkled over it, a scarlet blossom for every precious drop, flowering century after century; to flower in centuries to come, till at last the scattered dust and dew shall draw together again into the new body, like scattered musical notes gathering into a song, and the glorified spirit shall catch and weld them into one for ever!Looking awhile, they turned silently back into the garden. The two girls wandered among the flowers; Mr. Vane and the Signora walked silently side by side. Now and then they stopped to admire a campanile of lilies growing around a stem higher than their heads, springing from the midst of a sheaf of leaves like swords. One of these leaves, five feet long, perhaps, thrown aside by the gardener, lay in the path. It was milk-white and waxy, like a dead body, through its thickness of an inch or two. Long, purple thorns were set along its sides and at the point, and a faint tinge of gold color ran along the centre of its blade. It was not a withered leaf, but a dead one, and strong and beautiful in death.Mr. Vane glanced over the bristlinggreen point of the plant, and up the airy stem where its white bells drooped tenderly. “So God guards his saints,” he said.Isabel came to them in some trepidation with her fingers full of small thorns. She had been stealing, she confessed. Seeing that, in all the crowds of great, ugly cacti about, one only had blossomed, she had been smitten by a desire to possess that unique flower.“I called up my reasoning powers, as people do when they want to justify themselves,” she said, “and I reasoned the matter out, till it became not only excusable but a virtue in me to take the flower. I spare you the process. If only you would pick the needles out of my fingers, papa! Isn’t it a pretty blossom? It is a bell of golden crystal with a diamond heart.”When the tiny thorns were extracted and the young culprit properly reproved for her larceny, the clouds of the west had lost all their color but one lingering blush, and were beginning to catch the light of the moon, that was sailing through mid-air, as round as a bubble. They went down the winding avenue on foot, sending the carriage to wait for them in the street below. The trees over their heads were full of blossoms like little flies with black bodies and wide-spread, whitish wings, and through the heaps of these blossoms that had fallen they could see a green lizard slip now and then; the fountains plashed softly, lulling the day to sleep. Near the foot of the hill all the lower wall of one of the houses was hidden by skeins of brilliant, gold-colored silk, hung out to dry, perhaps, making a sort of sunshine in the shady street.It was a lovely drive home through theAve Mariasringing allabout, through the alternate gloom and light of narrow streets and openpiazze, where they spoke no word, but only looked about them with perhaps the same feeling in all their minds:“How good is our life—the mere living!”Not only the beauty they had seen and their own personal contentment pleased them; the richness and variety of the human element through which they passed gave them a sense of freedom, a fuller breath than they were accustomed to draw in a crowd. It was not a throng of people ground and smoothed into nearly the same habits and manners, but a going and coming and elbowing of individuals, many of whom retained the angles of their characters and manners in all their original sharpness.“The moon will be full to-morrow in honor of yourfesta,” Isabel said as they went into the house; “and there is a prospect that the roads may be sprinkled.”The roads were sprinkled with a vengeance; for the delectable mountains of sunset came up in the small hours and broke over the city in a torrent. There had not been such a tempest in Rome for years. It was impossible to sleep through it, and soon became impossible to lie in bed. Not all their closing of blinds and shutters could keep out the ceaseless flashes, and the windows rattled with the loud bursts of thunder. The three ladies dressed and went into the littlesala, where the Signora lighted two blessed candles and sprinkled holy water, like the old-fashioned Catholic she was; and presently Mr. Vane joined them.“I should have expected to hear more cultivated thunders here,” hesaid. “These are Goths and Vandals.”“Speak respectfully of those honest barbarians,” exclaimed the Signora. “They were strong and brave, and some things they would not do for gain. Do you recollect that Alaric’s men, when they were sacking Rome, being told that certain vessels of silver and gold were sacred, belonging to the service of the church, took the treasure on their heads and carried it toSt.Peter’s, the Romans falling into the procession, hymns mingling with their war-cries? Fancy Victor Emanuel’s people making restitution! Fancy Signor Bonghi and his associates marching in procession through the streets of Rome, bearing on their heads the libraries they have stolen from religious houses to make their grand library at the Roman College, which they have also stolen. Honor to the barbarians! There were things they respected. Ugh! what a flash. And what about cultivated thunders, Mr. Vane?”“Do you not know that there are thunders and thunders?” he replied. “Some roll like chariot-wheels from horizon to horizon, rattling and crashing, to be sure, but following a track. Others go clumsily tumbling about, without rhyme or reason, and you feel they may break through the roof any minute.”The rain fell in torrents, and came running in through chinks of the windows. The storm seemed to increase every moment. Bianca drew a footstool to the Signora’s side, and, seating herself on it, hid her face in her friend’s lap. Isabel sought refuge with her father, holding his arm closely, and they all became silent. Talk seems trivial in face of such a manifestationof the terrible strength of nature; and at night one is so much more impressed by a storm, all the little daylight securities falling off. They sat and waited, hoping that each sharp burst might be the culminating one.While they waited, suddenly through the storm broke loudly three clear strokes of a bell.“Oh!” cried Bianca, starting up.“Fulgura frango,” exclaimed the Signora triumphantly. Four strokes, five, and one followed with the sweet and deliberate strength of the great bell, then the others joined and sang through the night like a band of angels.“Brava, Maria Assunta!” exclaimed the Signora. “Where is the storm, Mr. Vane?”He did not answer. In fact, with the ceasing of the fifteen minutes’ ringing the storm ceased, and there was left only a low growling of spent thunders about the horizon, and a flutter of pallid light now and then. It was only the next morning at the breakfast-table that Mr. Vane thought to remark that the bell-ringer of the basilica must be a pretty good meteorologist, for he knew just when to strike in after the last great clap.“It was a most beautiful incident,” Bianca said seriously. “Please do not turn it into ridicule, papa!”They were just rising from the table, and, in speaking, the daughter put her arm around her father’s shoulder and kissed him, as if she would assure him of her loving respect in all that was human, even while reproving him from the height of a superior spiritual wisdom.The father had been wont to receive these soft admonitions affectionately, indeed, but somewhat lightly. Lately, however, he hadtaken them in a more serious manner. Perhaps the presence of the Signora, whose sentiments in such matters he could not regard as childish, and whose displeasure he could not look upon with the natural superiority of a father, put him a little more on his guard. He glanced at her now, biting his lip; but she did not seem to have heard.“May not the effect bell-ringing has on tempests be accounted for on natural principles?” Isabel asked, with the air of one making a philosophical discovery.“My dear Isabel, it is said that the miracles of Christ may be so accounted for,” the Signora replied. “But who is to account for the natural principles? We have no time to spare,” she added brightly. “The train starts in fifteen minutes. Hurry, children!”But, brightly as she spoke, a slight cloud settled over her feelings after this little incident. She was not displeased with Mr. Vane; for she had learned that no real irreverence underlay these occasional gibes, and had observed that they grew more rare, and were rather the effect of habit than of intention. She was grateful to him, indeed, for the delicacy and consideration he showed, and for the patience with which he submitted himself to a Catholic atmosphere and mode of life which did not touch his convictions, though it might not have been foreign to his tastes.“We are frequently as unjust to Protestants as they are to us,” she constantly said to her over-zealous friends. “If they are sincere in their disbelief, it would show a lack of principle in them to be over-indulgent and complacent to us. You must recollect that many a Protestant cannot help believing us guilty of something like, at least,unconscious idolatry; cannot help having a sort of horror for some of our ways. Besides, we must not claim merit to ourselves for having faith. ‘Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam.’ Then, again, here is an inquiry worth making: Look about among your Catholic acquaintances, including yourself among them, and ask, from your knowledge of them and of yourself, ‘If the drama of salvation were yet to be acted, and Christ were but just come on earth, poor, humble, and despised, how many of these people would follow him? Would I follow him? What instance of a sacrifice of worldly advantages, a giving up of friends and happiness, a willingness to be despised for God’s sake, have I or any of these given?’ It is easy, it is a little flattering, indeed, to one’s vanity, and pleasing to one’s imagination, to stand in very good company, among people many of whom are our superiors in rank and reputation, and have our opponents fire their poor little arrows at us. We feel ourselves very great heroes and heroines indeed, when, in truth, we are no more than stage heroes, with tinsel crowns and tin swords, and would fly affrighted before a real trial. It is easy to talk, and those who do the least talk the most and the most positively. Some of the noblest natures in the world are outside of the fold, some of the meanest are inside. God’s ways are not our ways, and we cannot disentangle these things. Only we should not take airs to ourselves. When I see the primitive ardor and nobleness of Christianity in a person, I hold that person as independent of circumstances, and am sure that he would join the company of the fishermen to-day, if they were but just called. Theothers I do not wish to judge, except when they make foolish pretences.”The Signora had sometimes displeased some of her friends by talking in this manner and pricking their vainglorious bubbles; and she consistently felt that, according to his light, Mr. Vane was forbearing with his daughters and with her, and that they should show some forbearance with him. She was, therefore, not displeased with him for his unintentional mocking. Her cloud came from another direction. She found herself changing a little, growing less evenly contented with her life, alternating unpleasantly between moods of happiness and depression. While she lived alone, receiving her friends for a few hours at a time, she had found her life tranquil and satisfying. Sympathy and kind services were always at hand, and there was always the equal or greater pleasure of sympathy and kind services demanded to make of friendship a double benefit. But the question had begun to glance now and then across her mind whether she had been altogether wise in taking this family into her house, having before her eyes the constant spectacle of an affection and intimacy such as she had left outside her own experience, and had no desire to invite or admit, even while she felt its charm. She, quite deprived of all family ties, felt sometimes a loneliness which she had never before experienced, in witnessing the affection of the father and his daughters; and, at the same time that she saw them as enclosed in a magic circle from which she was excluded, she looked forward with dread to the time when they should leave her, with a new void in her life, and a serenity permanently disturbed, perhaps. Therewere little moments, short and sharp, when she could have sympathized with Faust casting aside with passionate contempt his worthless gifts and learning at sight of the simple happiness of love and youth.But these moments and moods were short and disconnected. She was scarcely aware of them, scarcely remembered that each, as it came, was not the first, and her life flowed between them always pleasantly, sometimes joyfully. She was quite gay and happy when they ran down to the carriage and hurried to the station.The morning was delicious, everything washed clean and fresh by the plentiful shower. A light, pearly cloud covered the sky, veiling all with a delicate softness that was to sunshine as contentment is to joy. Here and there a deep shadow slept on the landscape. Our little party took possession of a first-class car, and seated, each at a corner of it, were every moment calling attention to some new beauty. Isabel glanced with delight along the great aqueduct lines and the pictures they framed, all blurred and swimming with the birds with which the stone arches were alive; Bianca watched the mountain, her eyes full of poetical fancies; and Mr. Vane presently fell in love with a square of solid green he espied in the midst of the bare Campagna, a little paradise, where the trees and flowers seemed to be bursting with luxuriance over the walls, and regarding with astonishment the dead country about them, that stretched off its low waves and undulations in strong and stubborn contrast with that redundant spot.“Aladdin’s lamp must have done it,” he said; and after a moment added, having followed the subject a little in his own mind: “I am inclinedto think that one element of the picturesque must be inconsistency. Ah! here are your white Campagna cattle we have heard so much about. Aren’t they of rather a bluish color?”“But look and see what they are eating, papa,” Bianca said. “No wonder it turns them blue.”The ground all about was deeply colored with blue flowers, in the midst of which these large, white cattle wandered, feeding lazily, as if eating were a pleasure, not a necessity. They were like people reading poetry.“We do not often have such a day here,” the Signora said, “and to me the clouds are a luxury. I own that I have sometimes grown weary of seeing that spotless blue overhead week after week, month after month, even. Clouds are tender, and give infinite lights and shades. The first winter I spent in Rome there were a hundred days in succession of windless, cloudless, golden weather, beginning in October, and lasting till after New Year’s day. Then came a sweet three days’ rain, which enchanted me. I went out twice a day in it.”“This reminds me,” Isabel said, “of our first visit to the White Mountains. We went there under the ‘rainy Hyades,’ apparently; for we hadn’t seen sunshine for a week. When we reached Lancaster, at evening, the fog touched our faces like a wet flannel, and there was a fine, thick rain in the morning when I awoke. About nine o’clock there was a brightening, and I looked up and saw a blue spot. The clouds melted away from it, still raining, and sunbeams shot across, but none came through. First I saw a green plain with a river winding through it, and countless little pools of water, everything a brilliant greenand silver. A few trees stood about knee-deep in grass and yellow grain. And then, all at once, down through the rain of water came a rain of sunshine; and, lastly, the curtains parted, and there were the mountains! They are a great deal more solemn looking and impressive than these,” she said, with a depreciatory glance toward the Alban Mountains. “On the whole, I think the scene was finer and more brilliant.”As if in answer to her criticism, a slim, swift sunbeam pierced suddenly the soft flecks of mist overhead, shot across the shadowed world, and dropped into Rome. Out blazed the marvellous dome, all golden in that light, the faint line of its distant colonnades started into vivid clearness with all their fine-wrought arches, and for a moment the city shone like a picture of a city seen by a magic-lantern in a dark room.“Very true!” the young woman replied quite coolly, as if she had been spoken to. “We have no such city, no such towns and villages and villas set on the mountainside; but we are young and fresh and strong, and we are brave, which you are not. Your past, and the ruins left of it, are all you can boast of. We have a present and a future. And after all,” she said, turning to her audience, who were smilingly listening to this perfectly serious address, “it is ungrateful of the sun to take the part of Italy so, when we welcome him into our houses, and they shut him out. Why, the windows of the Holy Father’s rooms at the Vatican are half walled up.”“Maybe the sun doesn’t consider it such a privilege to come into our houses,” her father suggested.“And as for Rome,” the young woman went on, “to me it seemsonly the skull of a dead Italy, and the Romans the worms crawling in and out. But there! I won’t scold to-day. How lovely everything is!”The yellow-green vineyards and the blue-green canebrakes came in sight, the olive-orchards rolled their smoke-like verdure up the hills, and at length the cars slid between the rose-trees of the Frascati station, and the crowd of passengers poured out and hurried up the stairs to secure carriages to take them to the town. The familyOttant’-Otto, finding themselves in a garden, did not make haste to leave it, but stayed to gather each a nosegay, nobody interfering. More than one, indeed, of the passengers paused long enough to snatch a rosebud in passing.Going up then to the station-yard, they found it quite deserted, except for the carriage that had been sent for them, and another drawn by a tandem of beautiful white horses, in whose ears their owner, one of the young princes living near the town, was fastening the roses he had just gathered below. The creatures seemed as vain of themselves as he evidently was proud of them, and held their heads quite still to be adorned, tossing their tails instead, which had been cut short, and tied round with a gay scarlet band.Every traveller knows that Frascati is built up the sides of the Tusculan hills, looking toward Rome, the railway station on a level with the Campagna, the town rising above with its countless street-stairs, and, still above, the magnificent villas over which look the ruins of ancient Tusculum. On one of the lower streets of the town, in Palazzo Simonetti, lived a friend of the Signora, and there rooms had beenprovided for the family, and every preparation made for their comfort. They found a second breakfast awaiting them, laid out in a room looking up to one of the loveliest nooks in the world—the littlepiazzaof theduomo vecchio, with its great arched doorway, and exquisite fountain overshadowed by a weeping willow. If it had been a common meal, they would have declined it; but it was a little feast for the eyes rather: a dish of long, slim strawberries from Nemi, where strawberries grow every month in the year by the shores of the beautiful lake, in a soil that has not yet forgotten that it once throbbed with volcanic fires; tiny rolls, ring-shaped and not much too large for a finger-ring, and golden shells of butter; all these laid on fresh vine-leaves and surrounded by pomegranate blossoms that shone like fire in the shaded room. The coffee-cups were after-dinner cups, and so small that no one need decline on the score of having already taken coffee; and there was no sign of cream, only a few lumps of sugar, white and shining as snow-crust.“It is frugal, dainty, and irresistible,” Mr. Vane said. “Let us accept by all means.”They were going up to Tusculum, and, as the day was advancing, set off after a few minutes, going on foot. They had preferred that way, being good walkers, and having, moreover, a unanimous disinclination to see themselves on donkeys.“A gentleman on a donkey is less a gentleman than the donkey,” Mr. Vane said. “I would walk a hundred miles sooner than ride one mile on a beast which has such short legs and such long ears. The atmosphere of the ridiculous which they carry with them is of a circumferenceto include the tallest sort of man. Besides, they have an uncomfortable way of sitting down suddenly, if they only feel a fly, and that hurts the self-love of the rider, if it doesn’t break his bones.”“Poor little patient wretches! how they have to suffer,” said the Signora. “Even their outcry, while the most pitiful sound in the world, a very sob of despairing pain, is the height of the ridiculous. If you don’t cry hearing it, you must laugh, unless, indeed, you should be angry. For they sometimes make a ‘situation’ by an inopportune bray, as a few weeks ago at the Arcadia. The Academy was holding anadunanzaat Palazzo Altemps, and, as the day was quite warm and the audience large, the windows into the back court were opened. The prose had been read, and a pretty, graceful poetess, the Countess G——, had recited one of her best poems, when a fine-looking monsignore rose to favor us with a sonnet. He writes and recites enthusiastically, and we prepared to listen with pleasure. He began, and, after the first line, a donkey in the court struck in with the loudest bray I ever heard. Monsignore continued, perfectly inaudible, and the donkey continued, obstreperously audible. A faint ripple of a smile touched the faces least able to control themselves. Monsignore went on with admirable perseverance, but with a somewhat heightened color. A sonnet has but fourteen lines, and the bray had thirteen. They closed simultaneously. Monsignore sat down; I don’t know what the donkey did. One only had been visible, as the other only had been audible. The audience applauded with great warmth and politeness. ‘Who are they applauding,’ askedmy companion of me—‘the one they have heard, or the one they have not heard?’ If it had been my sonnet, I should instantly have gone out, bought that donkey, and hired somebody to throw him into the Tiber.”“Here we are at the greatpiazza, and here is the cathedral. See how the people in the shops and fruit-stands water their flowers!”In fact, all the rim of the great fountain-basin was set round with a row of flower-pots containing plants that were dripping in the spray of the falling cascades. Just out of reach of the spray were two fruit shops large enough to contain the day’s store and the chair of the person who sold it. Temporary pipes from the fountain conducted water to the counters, where a tiny fountain tossed its borrowed jet, constantly renewed from the cool cascade, and constantly returning to the basin.“We must takeexcelsiorfor our motto,” the Signora said to the two girls, who wanted to stop and admire everything they saw. “We are for the mountain-height now. When we return, you may like to dress up with flowers two shrines on the road. I always do it when I come this way.”They climbed the steep and rocky lane between high walls, passed on the one side the house where Cardinal Baronius wrote his famousAnnals, which had an interest too dry to fascinate the two young ladies; passed the wide iron gate of a villa to left, and another to right, giving only a glance at the paradises within; passed the large painting of the Madonna embowered in trees at the foot of the Cappucini Avenue; passed under the stone portal, and the rod of verdant shadow almost as solid, that formedthe entrance to Villa Tuscolana, ravished now and then by glimpses of the magnificent distance; on into the lovely wood-road, the ancientVia Tusculana; and presently there they were at last in the birthplace of Cato, the air-hung city that broke the pride of Rome, and that, conquered at last, died in its defeat, and remained for ever a ruin.Not a word was spoken when they reached the summit, and stood gazing on what is, probably, the most magnificent view in the world. Only after a while, when the three new-comers began to move and come out of their first trance of admiration, the Signora named some of the chief points in the landscape and in the ruins. The old historical scenes started up, the old marvellous stories rushed back to their memories, the mountains crowded up as witnesses, and the towns, with all their teeming life and countless voices of the present hushed by distance, became voluble with voices and startling with life of the past.After a while they seated themselves in the shade of a tree, facing the west, and silently thought, or dreamed, or merely looked, as their mood might be. Their glances shot across the bosky heights that climbed to their feet, and across the wide Campagna, to where Rome lay like a heap of lilies thrown on a green carpet, and the glittering sickle of the distant sea curved round the world.Day deepened about them in waves. They could almost feel each wave flow over them as the sun mounted, touching degree after degree of the burning blue, as a hand touches octaves up an organ. The birds sang less, and the cicali more, and the plants sighed forth all their perfume.Isabel slipped off her shoes, and set her white-stockinged feet on a tiny laurel-bush, that bent kindly under them without breaking, making a soft and fragrant cushion. All took off their hats, and drank in the faint wind that was fresh, even at noon.“The first time I came here,” the Signora said after a while, “was on thefestaofSS.Roch and Sebastian, in the heat of late summertime. That is a great day for Frascati, for these two saints are their protectors against pestilence, which has never visited the city. When, in ’69, the cholera dropped one night on Albano, just round the mountain there a few miles, and struck people dead almost like lightning, and killed them on the road as they fled to other towns, so that many died, perhaps, from fear and horror, having no other illness, none who reached Frascati in health died. The nobility died as well as the low, and the cardinal bishop died at his post taking care of his people. Whole families came to Frascati, the people told me, flying by night along the dark, lonely road, some half-starving; for all the bakers were dead, and there was no bread except what was sent from Rome. The saints they trusted did not refuse to help them. In Frascati they found safety. If any died there, certainly none sickened there. So, of course, the saints were more honored than ever. I sat here and heard the bells all ringing at noon, and the guns firing salutes, and saw the lovely blue wreaths of smoke curl away over the roofs after each salvo. In Italy they do not praise God solely with the organ, but with the timbrel and the lute. Anything that expresses joy and triumph expresses religious joy and triumph, and the artilleryand military bands come out with the candles and the crucifix to honor the saint as well as the warrior. Then in the evening there was the grand procession, clergy, church choirs, military bands, crucifixes, banners, women dressed in the ancient costume of the town, and the bells all ringing, the guns all booming, and the route of the procession strewn with fragrant green. The evening deepened as they marched, and their candles, scarcely visible at first, grew brighter as they wound about the steep streets and the illuminated piazzas. All the houses had colored lamps out of their windows, and there were fireworks. But my noon up here impressed me most. My two guides, trusty men, and my only companions, sat contentedly in the shade playingMorraafter their frugal bread and wine. Sitting with my back to them, only faintly hearing their voices as they called the numbers, I could imagine that they were Achilles and Ajax, whom you can see on an ancient Etruscan vase in the Vatican playing the same game. The present was quite withdrawn from me. I felt likeAnnus Mundilooking down onAnnus Domini, and seeing the whole of it, too. I could have stayed all day, but that hunger admonished me; for I had not been so provident as my guides, nor as I have been to-day. Going down, however, just below the Capuchin convent, I saw a man on a donkey coming up, with a large basket slung at each side of the saddle in front of him. No one could doubt what was under those cool vine-leaves. He was carrying fresh figs up to the Villa Tuscolana, where some college was making theirvilligiatura. I showed him a few soldi, and he stopped and let me lift the leavesmyself. There they lay with soft cheek pressed to cheek, large, black figs as sweet as honey. The very skins of them would have sweetened your tea. Where we stood a little path that looked like a dry rivulet-bed led off under the wall of the convent grounds. When I asked where it went, they answered, ‘To the Madonna.’ We will go there on our way down. Meantime, has Isabel nothing hospitable to say to us?”Miss Vane displayed immediately the luncheon she had been detailed to prepare, a bottle of Orvieto, only less delicate because richer than champagne, a basket ofcianbelli, and lastly a box. “In the name of the prophet, figs!” she said, opening it. “They are dried, it is true; but then they are from Smyrna.”They drankfelicissima festato Bianca, drank to the past and the present, to all the world; and Mr. Vane, when their little feast was ended, slipped a beautiful ring on his younger daughter’s finger. “To remember Tusculum by, my dear,” he said; and, looking at her wistfully, seeming to miss some light-heartedness even in her smiles, he added: “Is there anything you lack, child?”She dropped her face to his arm only in time to hide a blush that covered it. “What could I lack?” she asked.But a few minutes afterward, while the others recalled historical events connected with the place, and the Signora pointed out the cities and mountains by name, the young girl walked away to the Roman side, and stood looking off with longing eyes toward the west. She lacked a voice, a glance, and a smile too dear to lose, and her heart cried out for them. She was not unhappy,for she trusted in God, and in the friend whose unspoken affection absence and estrangement had only strengthened her faith in; but she wanted to see him, or, at least, to know how he fared. It seemed to her at that moment that if she should look off toward that part of the world where he must be, fix her thoughts on him and call him, he would hear her and come. She called him, her tender whisper sending his name out through all the crowding ghosts of antiquity, past pope and king and ambassador, poet and orator, armies thrust back and armies triumphant—the little whisper winged and heralded by a power older and more potent than Tusculum or the mountain whereon its ruins lie.They went down the steep way again, gathering all the flowers they could find, and, when they reached the shrine at the turn of the Cappucini road, stuck the screen so full of pink, white, and purple blossoms that the faces of Our Lady and the Child could only just be discerned peeping out. Then they turned into the pebbly path under the Cappucini wall, where the woods and briers on one side, and the wall on the other, left them room only to walk in Indian file; came out on the height above beautiful Villa Lancilotti, with another burst of the Campagna before their eyes, and the mountains with their coronets of towns still visible at the northeast over the Borghese Avenue and the solid pile of Mondragone.Here, set so high on the wall that it had to be reached by two or three stone steps, was the picture of the Madonna, looking off from its almost inaccessible height over the surrounding country. It was visible from the villas below, and manya faithful soul far away had breathed a prayer to Mary at sight of it, though nothing was visible to him but the curve of high, white wall over the trees, and the square frame of the picture. Now and then a devout soul came through the lonely and thorny path to the very foot of the shrine, and left a prayer and a flower there.The others gave their flowers to Bianca, who climbed the steps, and set a border of bloom inside the frame, and pushed a flower through the wires to touch the Madonna’s hand, and set a little ring of yellow blossoms where it might look like a crown.As she stood on that height, visible as a speck only if one had looked up from the villa, smiling to herself happily while she performed her sweet and unaccustomed task, down in the town below, a speck like herself, stood a man leaning against the eagle-crested arch of the Borghese Villa gate, and watching her through a glass. He saw the slight, graceful form, whose every motion was so well known to him; saw the ribbon flutter in her uncovered hair, the little gray mantle dropped off the gray dress into the hands of the group at the foot of the steps; saw the arms raised to fix flower after flower; finally, when she turnedto come down, fancied that he saw her smile and blush of pleasure, and, conquered by his imagination, dropped the glass and held out his arms, for it seemed that she was stepping down to him.The party went home tired and satisfied, and did not go out again that day. It was pleasure enough to sit in the westward windows as the afternoon waned and watch the sun go down, and see how the mist that for ever lies over the Campagna caught his light till, when he burned on the horizon in one tangle of radiating gold, the whole wide space looked as if a steady rainbow had been straightened and drawn across it, every color in its order, glowing stratum upon stratum pressed over sea and city and vineyard, blurring all with a splendid haze, till the earth was brighter than even the cloudless sky.“It is so beautiful that even the stars come out before their time to look,” the Signora said. “Your Madonna on the wall can see it too, Bianca. But as for the poor Madonna in her nest of trees, she can see nothing but green and flowers.”“I wonder why I prefer the Madonna of the wall?” asked Bianca dreamily. “I feel happy thinking of it.”TO BE CONTINUED.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC.

BIANCA’S FESTA.

Bianca’sbirthday coming, they celebrated it by a little trip into the country. It was getting late for excursions, the weather being hot even for the last of May. But on the day before the proposed journey a few ragged clouds, scudding now and then across the sky, promised refreshment. Clouds never come to Rome for nothing; even the smallest fugitive mist is a herald; and the family, therefore, looked anxiously to see if they were to be kept at home the next day—if the herald announced a royal progress, short and splendid, or a long siege of rainy days.

They were sauntering, late in the afternoon, through a street of the Suburra, on one of those aimless walks that hit the mark of pleasure far oftener than planned pleasure-seeking does, and, seeing at their left a steep grade that ended in a stair climbing through light and shadow up the hillside, and going out under a dark arch into the light again, they followed it without asking questions, and presently found themselves in a quietpiazzasurrounded by churches and convents as silent and, apparently, uninhabited as a desert. The most living thing was a single lofty palm-tree that leaned out against the sky. A wall hid the base of it, where one would not have been surprised to have found a lion sleeping.

Entering the portico of the nearestchurch, they saw what might have been taken for two ancient, mossy statues, seated one at either side of the door, one representing a man as ragged and gray as Rip Van Winkle after his nap, the other a woman well fitted to be his companion. The statues stirred, however, at the sound of steps, extended their withered hands, and commenced a sort of gabbling appeal, in which nothing was distinguishable but the inevitablequalche cosa.

Inside the church, beside the beautiful Presence indicated by the ever-burning lamp, there was but one person, a gigantic man, all white, who sat leaning forward a little, with the fingers of his right hand tangled in his beard. They saw him gazing, almost glaring, at them across the church as they seated themselves near the door after a short adoration. The painted roof invited their eyes to glimpses of heaven, the tribune walls shone with the story ofSt.Peter liberated by an angel, and the antique columns told of pagan emperors whom they had served before they were raised to hold a canopy over the head of the King of kings; but through them all, becoming every moment more importunate and terrible, the stare of those motionless, stony eyes drew theirs with an uncomfortable fascination, and the figure seemed to lean more forward, as if about to stride toward them,and the fingers to move in the beard, as if longing to catch and toss them out of the church.

“He appears to resent our not saluting him,” Mr. Vane said. “I do not need an introduction. Suppose we go to him before he comes clattering down the nave to us!”

They rose, and, with a diffidence amounting almost to fear, went up the aisle to pay their respects to Michael Angelo’sMoses.

“O Mr. Vane!” the Signora whispered, suddenly touching his arm, “does he look as if he went up the mountain to bring down Protestantism?”

She said it impulsively, and was ashamed of herself the next moment. He was not offended, however, but smiled slightly, and, feeling the touch, drew her hand into his arm. “He doesn’t look like a man who would carry any sort ofismabout long.”

He was looking at theMosesas he spoke; but he felt the dissatisfaction which the lady at his side did not indicate by word or motion, and added after a moment: “It must be owned that Protestantism has reduced the stone tables to dust, and that your church is the only one that has graven laws.”

She did not venture to press him any farther. The question with him, then, was evidently whether graven laws were necessary. He was not at all likely to write his faith in the dust of the sects.

“It is the most uncomfortable marble person in Rome,” she said of theMoses. “I always have a feeling that it is never quite still; that he has turned his face on being interrupted in something, as if he had been talking with God here alone, and were waiting for people to go and leave him to continue the conversation. He will watch usout the door, though. I wonder if he can see through the leathern curtain? Come, little girls, we are going.”

Bianca had a rose in her belt, and, as the others walked slowly away, she slipped across the church and threw it inside the railing before the Blessed Sacrament, repeating from the Canticle ofSt.Francis of Assisi, which they had been reading with their Italian teacher the evening before:

“Laudate sia il mio Signor per la nostraMadre terra, la qualeCi sostenta, e nudrisce col produrreTanta diversitàD’erba, di fiori e frutti.”

“Laudate sia il mio Signor per la nostraMadre terra, la qualeCi sostenta, e nudrisce col produrreTanta diversitàD’erba, di fiori e frutti.”

“Laudate sia il mio Signor per la nostra

Madre terra, la quale

Ci sostenta, e nudrisce col produrre

Tanta diversità

D’erba, di fiori e frutti.”

“They speak of the Blessed Sacrament here asIl Santissimo,” she heard the Signora say when she joined them at the door. “It is beautiful; but I prefer the Spanish title of ‘His Majesty.’ One would like to be able to ask, on entering a church, ‘At which altar is His Majesty?’ It sounds like a live faith. Isn’t that palm beautiful? And do you see the ghost of Lucretia Borgia up in her balcony there? That is, or was, her balcony. Dear me! what an uncanny afternoon it is. I quite long to get among common people.”

In fact, a solid post of snow-white cloud showed like a motionless figure over the balcony, changing neither shape nor position while they looked at it. There was, evidently, something behind worth seeing, and they took a carriage to the Janiculum for a better view. When they reached the parapet of San Pietro in Montorio, they saw the horizon beyond the city bound by a wonderful mountain-range—not the accustomed Sabine Apennines and Monte Cimino; these had disappeared, and over their places rose a solid magnificence of cloud thatmade the earth and sky look unstable. Ruby peaks splintered here and there against the blue in sharp pinnacles, their sides cleft into gorges of fine gold, their bases wrapped about with the motionless smoke and flame of a petrified conflagration. Beneath all were rough masses of uneasy darkness, in which could be seen faintly the throb of a pulse of fire. The royal progress had begun, and promised to be a costly one to some. The poor farmers would have to pay, at least.

They leaned on the parapet, and took a new lesson in shape and color from the inexhaustible skies, and the Signora told them one of the many legends of the Janiculum.

“It is said that after the Flood Noe came here to live, held in high honor, as we may well imagine, by his descendants. As time passed, after his death, the truth became mixed with error, and the patriarch Noe became the god Janus, with two faces, because he had seen the old world and the new. So all antique truth, left to human care, became corrupted little by little. It was only when the Holy Spirit came down to stay on earth that truth could be preserved unadulterated. ‘Teaching you all truth.’ Am I preaching? Excuse me!”

Turning her face, as she spoke slowly and dreamily, she had found Mr. Vane looking at her with a steady and grave regard which did not evade, but lingered an instant, when it met hers. She recollected that he had not her faith, and thought he might be displeased a little at having alien doctrines so constantly held up before him.

On the contrary, he was admiring her fair, pale face, which the glowing west and a glowing thought were tinting with soft rose, and wasthinking he had never known a woman who so habitually lived in a high atmosphere, who so easily gathered about her the beauties of the past and the present, and who had so little gossip to talk. When she descended to trifling things, it was to invest them with a charm that made them worthy of notice as pretty and interesting trifles, but never to elevate them to places they were not made for. Besides, he liked her way of talking—a certain cool sweetness of manner, like the sweetness of a rose, that touched those who came near, but was not awakened by their presence, and would be as sweet were no one by to know. He glanced at her again when she was again looking off thoughtfully into the west, and marked the light touch with gold the strands of a braid that crowned her head under the violet wreath. She was certainly a very lovely woman, he thought. Why had she never married?

For, though we call her Signora, the Vanes’padronawas, in fact, asignorina.

“Well, what is it?” she asked smilingly, turning again, aware of his eyes. She was one of those persons who always feel the stress of another mind brought to bear on them. “You should tell me what it is.”

The two girls had gone to a little distance, and he ventured to put the question.

“It is an impertinence,” he said hastily, “but I was wondering why you never married. You are thirty-five years old, and have had time and opportunities. If you command me to ask no more, I shall not blame you.”

“It is not an impertinence,” she replied quite easily. “There is no tragedy hidden behind my ‘maidenmeditation.’ The simple truth is that I have never had an offer from any one whom I could willingly or possibly promise to love, honor, and obey for my whole life, though I have refused some with regret; and if I have known any person to whom I could have so devoted myself, no approach on his part and no consciousness on mine have ever revealed the fact to me. My mind and life were always full. My mother taught me to love books and nature, and said nothing about marriage. There is nothing like having plenty to think of. Are you satisfied?”

“Perfectly,” he replied, but seemed not altogether pleased. Perhaps he would have found a less self-sufficing woman more interesting and amiable. “Still, I beg your pardon for a question which, after all, no one should ask. One never knows what may have happened in a life.”

“That is true,” she replied. “And it is true that the question might be to some an embarrassing one to answer. It does not hurt me, however.”

“Papa does not allow us to ask questions,” Isabel said a little complainingly, having caught a few words of their talk. “You have no idea how sharply he will speak to us, or, at least, look at us, if he hears us asking the simplest question that can be at all personal. And yet people question us unmercifully. I think one might retort in self-defence.”

“How I wish you could have a larger number of pupils than these two, Mr. Vane!” the Signora sighed. “I would like to send some of my lady friends to school to you. The questions that some ladies, who consider themselves well bred, will ask, are astonishing. Indeed, there is, I think, more vulgarity in finesociety than among any other class of people in the world. Delicacy and refinement are flowers that need a little shade to keep their freshness. I have more than once been shocked to see, in a momentary revelation, how slight was the difference of character between a bold, unscrupulous virago of the streets, and some fine lady when an unpleasant excitement had disturbed the thin polish of manner with which she was coated. Madame de Montespan—not a model by any means, though—relates that, when she came to Paris to be trained for polite life, among the admonitions and prohibitions, one of the strongest was that she must not ask questions. Not long ago, on thinking over a conversation I had with a lady whom I had known just three weeks, I found that these questions had been propounded to me in the course of it: How old are you? Who visits you? What is your income? Have you any money laid up? Have you sold your last story? To whom have you sold it? How much do they pay you? Is it paid for? Of course the lady was fitting herself to speak with authority of my affairs.”

The Signora made an impatient motion of the shoulders, as if throwing off a disagreeable burden. “How did we fall into this miserable subject? Let us walk about awhile and shake it off. We might go into the church and say a little prayer for poor Beatrice Cenci, who is buried here. One glance at Piombo’sScourging of Christ, one thought of that girl’s terrible tragedy, will scorch out these petty thoughts, if one breath of the Lord’s presence should not blow them away.”

She hurried up the steps and ran into the church, as one soiled anddusty with travel rushes into a bath. Coming out again, they strolled back into the gardens, and looked off over the green sea of the luxuriant Campagna, whereSt.Paul’s Church floated like an ark, half swamped in verdure and flowers, and a glistening bend of the Tiber bound the fragrantly breathing groves like a girdle, the bridge across it a silver buckle. Beneath the wall that stopped their feet a grassy angle of the villa beyond was red with poppies growing on their tall stems in the shade. So everywhere in Italy the faithful soil commemorates the blood of the martyrs that has been sprinkled over it, a scarlet blossom for every precious drop, flowering century after century; to flower in centuries to come, till at last the scattered dust and dew shall draw together again into the new body, like scattered musical notes gathering into a song, and the glorified spirit shall catch and weld them into one for ever!

Looking awhile, they turned silently back into the garden. The two girls wandered among the flowers; Mr. Vane and the Signora walked silently side by side. Now and then they stopped to admire a campanile of lilies growing around a stem higher than their heads, springing from the midst of a sheaf of leaves like swords. One of these leaves, five feet long, perhaps, thrown aside by the gardener, lay in the path. It was milk-white and waxy, like a dead body, through its thickness of an inch or two. Long, purple thorns were set along its sides and at the point, and a faint tinge of gold color ran along the centre of its blade. It was not a withered leaf, but a dead one, and strong and beautiful in death.

Mr. Vane glanced over the bristlinggreen point of the plant, and up the airy stem where its white bells drooped tenderly. “So God guards his saints,” he said.

Isabel came to them in some trepidation with her fingers full of small thorns. She had been stealing, she confessed. Seeing that, in all the crowds of great, ugly cacti about, one only had blossomed, she had been smitten by a desire to possess that unique flower.

“I called up my reasoning powers, as people do when they want to justify themselves,” she said, “and I reasoned the matter out, till it became not only excusable but a virtue in me to take the flower. I spare you the process. If only you would pick the needles out of my fingers, papa! Isn’t it a pretty blossom? It is a bell of golden crystal with a diamond heart.”

When the tiny thorns were extracted and the young culprit properly reproved for her larceny, the clouds of the west had lost all their color but one lingering blush, and were beginning to catch the light of the moon, that was sailing through mid-air, as round as a bubble. They went down the winding avenue on foot, sending the carriage to wait for them in the street below. The trees over their heads were full of blossoms like little flies with black bodies and wide-spread, whitish wings, and through the heaps of these blossoms that had fallen they could see a green lizard slip now and then; the fountains plashed softly, lulling the day to sleep. Near the foot of the hill all the lower wall of one of the houses was hidden by skeins of brilliant, gold-colored silk, hung out to dry, perhaps, making a sort of sunshine in the shady street.

It was a lovely drive home through theAve Mariasringing allabout, through the alternate gloom and light of narrow streets and openpiazze, where they spoke no word, but only looked about them with perhaps the same feeling in all their minds:

“How good is our life—the mere living!”

“How good is our life—the mere living!”

“How good is our life—the mere living!”

Not only the beauty they had seen and their own personal contentment pleased them; the richness and variety of the human element through which they passed gave them a sense of freedom, a fuller breath than they were accustomed to draw in a crowd. It was not a throng of people ground and smoothed into nearly the same habits and manners, but a going and coming and elbowing of individuals, many of whom retained the angles of their characters and manners in all their original sharpness.

“The moon will be full to-morrow in honor of yourfesta,” Isabel said as they went into the house; “and there is a prospect that the roads may be sprinkled.”

The roads were sprinkled with a vengeance; for the delectable mountains of sunset came up in the small hours and broke over the city in a torrent. There had not been such a tempest in Rome for years. It was impossible to sleep through it, and soon became impossible to lie in bed. Not all their closing of blinds and shutters could keep out the ceaseless flashes, and the windows rattled with the loud bursts of thunder. The three ladies dressed and went into the littlesala, where the Signora lighted two blessed candles and sprinkled holy water, like the old-fashioned Catholic she was; and presently Mr. Vane joined them.

“I should have expected to hear more cultivated thunders here,” hesaid. “These are Goths and Vandals.”

“Speak respectfully of those honest barbarians,” exclaimed the Signora. “They were strong and brave, and some things they would not do for gain. Do you recollect that Alaric’s men, when they were sacking Rome, being told that certain vessels of silver and gold were sacred, belonging to the service of the church, took the treasure on their heads and carried it toSt.Peter’s, the Romans falling into the procession, hymns mingling with their war-cries? Fancy Victor Emanuel’s people making restitution! Fancy Signor Bonghi and his associates marching in procession through the streets of Rome, bearing on their heads the libraries they have stolen from religious houses to make their grand library at the Roman College, which they have also stolen. Honor to the barbarians! There were things they respected. Ugh! what a flash. And what about cultivated thunders, Mr. Vane?”

“Do you not know that there are thunders and thunders?” he replied. “Some roll like chariot-wheels from horizon to horizon, rattling and crashing, to be sure, but following a track. Others go clumsily tumbling about, without rhyme or reason, and you feel they may break through the roof any minute.”

The rain fell in torrents, and came running in through chinks of the windows. The storm seemed to increase every moment. Bianca drew a footstool to the Signora’s side, and, seating herself on it, hid her face in her friend’s lap. Isabel sought refuge with her father, holding his arm closely, and they all became silent. Talk seems trivial in face of such a manifestationof the terrible strength of nature; and at night one is so much more impressed by a storm, all the little daylight securities falling off. They sat and waited, hoping that each sharp burst might be the culminating one.

While they waited, suddenly through the storm broke loudly three clear strokes of a bell.

“Oh!” cried Bianca, starting up.

“Fulgura frango,” exclaimed the Signora triumphantly. Four strokes, five, and one followed with the sweet and deliberate strength of the great bell, then the others joined and sang through the night like a band of angels.

“Brava, Maria Assunta!” exclaimed the Signora. “Where is the storm, Mr. Vane?”

He did not answer. In fact, with the ceasing of the fifteen minutes’ ringing the storm ceased, and there was left only a low growling of spent thunders about the horizon, and a flutter of pallid light now and then. It was only the next morning at the breakfast-table that Mr. Vane thought to remark that the bell-ringer of the basilica must be a pretty good meteorologist, for he knew just when to strike in after the last great clap.

“It was a most beautiful incident,” Bianca said seriously. “Please do not turn it into ridicule, papa!”

They were just rising from the table, and, in speaking, the daughter put her arm around her father’s shoulder and kissed him, as if she would assure him of her loving respect in all that was human, even while reproving him from the height of a superior spiritual wisdom.

The father had been wont to receive these soft admonitions affectionately, indeed, but somewhat lightly. Lately, however, he hadtaken them in a more serious manner. Perhaps the presence of the Signora, whose sentiments in such matters he could not regard as childish, and whose displeasure he could not look upon with the natural superiority of a father, put him a little more on his guard. He glanced at her now, biting his lip; but she did not seem to have heard.

“May not the effect bell-ringing has on tempests be accounted for on natural principles?” Isabel asked, with the air of one making a philosophical discovery.

“My dear Isabel, it is said that the miracles of Christ may be so accounted for,” the Signora replied. “But who is to account for the natural principles? We have no time to spare,” she added brightly. “The train starts in fifteen minutes. Hurry, children!”

But, brightly as she spoke, a slight cloud settled over her feelings after this little incident. She was not displeased with Mr. Vane; for she had learned that no real irreverence underlay these occasional gibes, and had observed that they grew more rare, and were rather the effect of habit than of intention. She was grateful to him, indeed, for the delicacy and consideration he showed, and for the patience with which he submitted himself to a Catholic atmosphere and mode of life which did not touch his convictions, though it might not have been foreign to his tastes.

“We are frequently as unjust to Protestants as they are to us,” she constantly said to her over-zealous friends. “If they are sincere in their disbelief, it would show a lack of principle in them to be over-indulgent and complacent to us. You must recollect that many a Protestant cannot help believing us guilty of something like, at least,unconscious idolatry; cannot help having a sort of horror for some of our ways. Besides, we must not claim merit to ourselves for having faith. ‘Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam.’ Then, again, here is an inquiry worth making: Look about among your Catholic acquaintances, including yourself among them, and ask, from your knowledge of them and of yourself, ‘If the drama of salvation were yet to be acted, and Christ were but just come on earth, poor, humble, and despised, how many of these people would follow him? Would I follow him? What instance of a sacrifice of worldly advantages, a giving up of friends and happiness, a willingness to be despised for God’s sake, have I or any of these given?’ It is easy, it is a little flattering, indeed, to one’s vanity, and pleasing to one’s imagination, to stand in very good company, among people many of whom are our superiors in rank and reputation, and have our opponents fire their poor little arrows at us. We feel ourselves very great heroes and heroines indeed, when, in truth, we are no more than stage heroes, with tinsel crowns and tin swords, and would fly affrighted before a real trial. It is easy to talk, and those who do the least talk the most and the most positively. Some of the noblest natures in the world are outside of the fold, some of the meanest are inside. God’s ways are not our ways, and we cannot disentangle these things. Only we should not take airs to ourselves. When I see the primitive ardor and nobleness of Christianity in a person, I hold that person as independent of circumstances, and am sure that he would join the company of the fishermen to-day, if they were but just called. Theothers I do not wish to judge, except when they make foolish pretences.”

The Signora had sometimes displeased some of her friends by talking in this manner and pricking their vainglorious bubbles; and she consistently felt that, according to his light, Mr. Vane was forbearing with his daughters and with her, and that they should show some forbearance with him. She was, therefore, not displeased with him for his unintentional mocking. Her cloud came from another direction. She found herself changing a little, growing less evenly contented with her life, alternating unpleasantly between moods of happiness and depression. While she lived alone, receiving her friends for a few hours at a time, she had found her life tranquil and satisfying. Sympathy and kind services were always at hand, and there was always the equal or greater pleasure of sympathy and kind services demanded to make of friendship a double benefit. But the question had begun to glance now and then across her mind whether she had been altogether wise in taking this family into her house, having before her eyes the constant spectacle of an affection and intimacy such as she had left outside her own experience, and had no desire to invite or admit, even while she felt its charm. She, quite deprived of all family ties, felt sometimes a loneliness which she had never before experienced, in witnessing the affection of the father and his daughters; and, at the same time that she saw them as enclosed in a magic circle from which she was excluded, she looked forward with dread to the time when they should leave her, with a new void in her life, and a serenity permanently disturbed, perhaps. Therewere little moments, short and sharp, when she could have sympathized with Faust casting aside with passionate contempt his worthless gifts and learning at sight of the simple happiness of love and youth.

But these moments and moods were short and disconnected. She was scarcely aware of them, scarcely remembered that each, as it came, was not the first, and her life flowed between them always pleasantly, sometimes joyfully. She was quite gay and happy when they ran down to the carriage and hurried to the station.

The morning was delicious, everything washed clean and fresh by the plentiful shower. A light, pearly cloud covered the sky, veiling all with a delicate softness that was to sunshine as contentment is to joy. Here and there a deep shadow slept on the landscape. Our little party took possession of a first-class car, and seated, each at a corner of it, were every moment calling attention to some new beauty. Isabel glanced with delight along the great aqueduct lines and the pictures they framed, all blurred and swimming with the birds with which the stone arches were alive; Bianca watched the mountain, her eyes full of poetical fancies; and Mr. Vane presently fell in love with a square of solid green he espied in the midst of the bare Campagna, a little paradise, where the trees and flowers seemed to be bursting with luxuriance over the walls, and regarding with astonishment the dead country about them, that stretched off its low waves and undulations in strong and stubborn contrast with that redundant spot.

“Aladdin’s lamp must have done it,” he said; and after a moment added, having followed the subject a little in his own mind: “I am inclinedto think that one element of the picturesque must be inconsistency. Ah! here are your white Campagna cattle we have heard so much about. Aren’t they of rather a bluish color?”

“But look and see what they are eating, papa,” Bianca said. “No wonder it turns them blue.”

The ground all about was deeply colored with blue flowers, in the midst of which these large, white cattle wandered, feeding lazily, as if eating were a pleasure, not a necessity. They were like people reading poetry.

“We do not often have such a day here,” the Signora said, “and to me the clouds are a luxury. I own that I have sometimes grown weary of seeing that spotless blue overhead week after week, month after month, even. Clouds are tender, and give infinite lights and shades. The first winter I spent in Rome there were a hundred days in succession of windless, cloudless, golden weather, beginning in October, and lasting till after New Year’s day. Then came a sweet three days’ rain, which enchanted me. I went out twice a day in it.”

“This reminds me,” Isabel said, “of our first visit to the White Mountains. We went there under the ‘rainy Hyades,’ apparently; for we hadn’t seen sunshine for a week. When we reached Lancaster, at evening, the fog touched our faces like a wet flannel, and there was a fine, thick rain in the morning when I awoke. About nine o’clock there was a brightening, and I looked up and saw a blue spot. The clouds melted away from it, still raining, and sunbeams shot across, but none came through. First I saw a green plain with a river winding through it, and countless little pools of water, everything a brilliant greenand silver. A few trees stood about knee-deep in grass and yellow grain. And then, all at once, down through the rain of water came a rain of sunshine; and, lastly, the curtains parted, and there were the mountains! They are a great deal more solemn looking and impressive than these,” she said, with a depreciatory glance toward the Alban Mountains. “On the whole, I think the scene was finer and more brilliant.”

As if in answer to her criticism, a slim, swift sunbeam pierced suddenly the soft flecks of mist overhead, shot across the shadowed world, and dropped into Rome. Out blazed the marvellous dome, all golden in that light, the faint line of its distant colonnades started into vivid clearness with all their fine-wrought arches, and for a moment the city shone like a picture of a city seen by a magic-lantern in a dark room.

“Very true!” the young woman replied quite coolly, as if she had been spoken to. “We have no such city, no such towns and villages and villas set on the mountainside; but we are young and fresh and strong, and we are brave, which you are not. Your past, and the ruins left of it, are all you can boast of. We have a present and a future. And after all,” she said, turning to her audience, who were smilingly listening to this perfectly serious address, “it is ungrateful of the sun to take the part of Italy so, when we welcome him into our houses, and they shut him out. Why, the windows of the Holy Father’s rooms at the Vatican are half walled up.”

“Maybe the sun doesn’t consider it such a privilege to come into our houses,” her father suggested.

“And as for Rome,” the young woman went on, “to me it seemsonly the skull of a dead Italy, and the Romans the worms crawling in and out. But there! I won’t scold to-day. How lovely everything is!”

The yellow-green vineyards and the blue-green canebrakes came in sight, the olive-orchards rolled their smoke-like verdure up the hills, and at length the cars slid between the rose-trees of the Frascati station, and the crowd of passengers poured out and hurried up the stairs to secure carriages to take them to the town. The familyOttant’-Otto, finding themselves in a garden, did not make haste to leave it, but stayed to gather each a nosegay, nobody interfering. More than one, indeed, of the passengers paused long enough to snatch a rosebud in passing.

Going up then to the station-yard, they found it quite deserted, except for the carriage that had been sent for them, and another drawn by a tandem of beautiful white horses, in whose ears their owner, one of the young princes living near the town, was fastening the roses he had just gathered below. The creatures seemed as vain of themselves as he evidently was proud of them, and held their heads quite still to be adorned, tossing their tails instead, which had been cut short, and tied round with a gay scarlet band.

Every traveller knows that Frascati is built up the sides of the Tusculan hills, looking toward Rome, the railway station on a level with the Campagna, the town rising above with its countless street-stairs, and, still above, the magnificent villas over which look the ruins of ancient Tusculum. On one of the lower streets of the town, in Palazzo Simonetti, lived a friend of the Signora, and there rooms had beenprovided for the family, and every preparation made for their comfort. They found a second breakfast awaiting them, laid out in a room looking up to one of the loveliest nooks in the world—the littlepiazzaof theduomo vecchio, with its great arched doorway, and exquisite fountain overshadowed by a weeping willow. If it had been a common meal, they would have declined it; but it was a little feast for the eyes rather: a dish of long, slim strawberries from Nemi, where strawberries grow every month in the year by the shores of the beautiful lake, in a soil that has not yet forgotten that it once throbbed with volcanic fires; tiny rolls, ring-shaped and not much too large for a finger-ring, and golden shells of butter; all these laid on fresh vine-leaves and surrounded by pomegranate blossoms that shone like fire in the shaded room. The coffee-cups were after-dinner cups, and so small that no one need decline on the score of having already taken coffee; and there was no sign of cream, only a few lumps of sugar, white and shining as snow-crust.

“It is frugal, dainty, and irresistible,” Mr. Vane said. “Let us accept by all means.”

They were going up to Tusculum, and, as the day was advancing, set off after a few minutes, going on foot. They had preferred that way, being good walkers, and having, moreover, a unanimous disinclination to see themselves on donkeys.

“A gentleman on a donkey is less a gentleman than the donkey,” Mr. Vane said. “I would walk a hundred miles sooner than ride one mile on a beast which has such short legs and such long ears. The atmosphere of the ridiculous which they carry with them is of a circumferenceto include the tallest sort of man. Besides, they have an uncomfortable way of sitting down suddenly, if they only feel a fly, and that hurts the self-love of the rider, if it doesn’t break his bones.”

“Poor little patient wretches! how they have to suffer,” said the Signora. “Even their outcry, while the most pitiful sound in the world, a very sob of despairing pain, is the height of the ridiculous. If you don’t cry hearing it, you must laugh, unless, indeed, you should be angry. For they sometimes make a ‘situation’ by an inopportune bray, as a few weeks ago at the Arcadia. The Academy was holding anadunanzaat Palazzo Altemps, and, as the day was quite warm and the audience large, the windows into the back court were opened. The prose had been read, and a pretty, graceful poetess, the Countess G——, had recited one of her best poems, when a fine-looking monsignore rose to favor us with a sonnet. He writes and recites enthusiastically, and we prepared to listen with pleasure. He began, and, after the first line, a donkey in the court struck in with the loudest bray I ever heard. Monsignore continued, perfectly inaudible, and the donkey continued, obstreperously audible. A faint ripple of a smile touched the faces least able to control themselves. Monsignore went on with admirable perseverance, but with a somewhat heightened color. A sonnet has but fourteen lines, and the bray had thirteen. They closed simultaneously. Monsignore sat down; I don’t know what the donkey did. One only had been visible, as the other only had been audible. The audience applauded with great warmth and politeness. ‘Who are they applauding,’ askedmy companion of me—‘the one they have heard, or the one they have not heard?’ If it had been my sonnet, I should instantly have gone out, bought that donkey, and hired somebody to throw him into the Tiber.”

“Here we are at the greatpiazza, and here is the cathedral. See how the people in the shops and fruit-stands water their flowers!”

In fact, all the rim of the great fountain-basin was set round with a row of flower-pots containing plants that were dripping in the spray of the falling cascades. Just out of reach of the spray were two fruit shops large enough to contain the day’s store and the chair of the person who sold it. Temporary pipes from the fountain conducted water to the counters, where a tiny fountain tossed its borrowed jet, constantly renewed from the cool cascade, and constantly returning to the basin.

“We must takeexcelsiorfor our motto,” the Signora said to the two girls, who wanted to stop and admire everything they saw. “We are for the mountain-height now. When we return, you may like to dress up with flowers two shrines on the road. I always do it when I come this way.”

They climbed the steep and rocky lane between high walls, passed on the one side the house where Cardinal Baronius wrote his famousAnnals, which had an interest too dry to fascinate the two young ladies; passed the wide iron gate of a villa to left, and another to right, giving only a glance at the paradises within; passed the large painting of the Madonna embowered in trees at the foot of the Cappucini Avenue; passed under the stone portal, and the rod of verdant shadow almost as solid, that formedthe entrance to Villa Tuscolana, ravished now and then by glimpses of the magnificent distance; on into the lovely wood-road, the ancientVia Tusculana; and presently there they were at last in the birthplace of Cato, the air-hung city that broke the pride of Rome, and that, conquered at last, died in its defeat, and remained for ever a ruin.

Not a word was spoken when they reached the summit, and stood gazing on what is, probably, the most magnificent view in the world. Only after a while, when the three new-comers began to move and come out of their first trance of admiration, the Signora named some of the chief points in the landscape and in the ruins. The old historical scenes started up, the old marvellous stories rushed back to their memories, the mountains crowded up as witnesses, and the towns, with all their teeming life and countless voices of the present hushed by distance, became voluble with voices and startling with life of the past.

After a while they seated themselves in the shade of a tree, facing the west, and silently thought, or dreamed, or merely looked, as their mood might be. Their glances shot across the bosky heights that climbed to their feet, and across the wide Campagna, to where Rome lay like a heap of lilies thrown on a green carpet, and the glittering sickle of the distant sea curved round the world.

Day deepened about them in waves. They could almost feel each wave flow over them as the sun mounted, touching degree after degree of the burning blue, as a hand touches octaves up an organ. The birds sang less, and the cicali more, and the plants sighed forth all their perfume.

Isabel slipped off her shoes, and set her white-stockinged feet on a tiny laurel-bush, that bent kindly under them without breaking, making a soft and fragrant cushion. All took off their hats, and drank in the faint wind that was fresh, even at noon.

“The first time I came here,” the Signora said after a while, “was on thefestaofSS.Roch and Sebastian, in the heat of late summertime. That is a great day for Frascati, for these two saints are their protectors against pestilence, which has never visited the city. When, in ’69, the cholera dropped one night on Albano, just round the mountain there a few miles, and struck people dead almost like lightning, and killed them on the road as they fled to other towns, so that many died, perhaps, from fear and horror, having no other illness, none who reached Frascati in health died. The nobility died as well as the low, and the cardinal bishop died at his post taking care of his people. Whole families came to Frascati, the people told me, flying by night along the dark, lonely road, some half-starving; for all the bakers were dead, and there was no bread except what was sent from Rome. The saints they trusted did not refuse to help them. In Frascati they found safety. If any died there, certainly none sickened there. So, of course, the saints were more honored than ever. I sat here and heard the bells all ringing at noon, and the guns firing salutes, and saw the lovely blue wreaths of smoke curl away over the roofs after each salvo. In Italy they do not praise God solely with the organ, but with the timbrel and the lute. Anything that expresses joy and triumph expresses religious joy and triumph, and the artilleryand military bands come out with the candles and the crucifix to honor the saint as well as the warrior. Then in the evening there was the grand procession, clergy, church choirs, military bands, crucifixes, banners, women dressed in the ancient costume of the town, and the bells all ringing, the guns all booming, and the route of the procession strewn with fragrant green. The evening deepened as they marched, and their candles, scarcely visible at first, grew brighter as they wound about the steep streets and the illuminated piazzas. All the houses had colored lamps out of their windows, and there were fireworks. But my noon up here impressed me most. My two guides, trusty men, and my only companions, sat contentedly in the shade playingMorraafter their frugal bread and wine. Sitting with my back to them, only faintly hearing their voices as they called the numbers, I could imagine that they were Achilles and Ajax, whom you can see on an ancient Etruscan vase in the Vatican playing the same game. The present was quite withdrawn from me. I felt likeAnnus Mundilooking down onAnnus Domini, and seeing the whole of it, too. I could have stayed all day, but that hunger admonished me; for I had not been so provident as my guides, nor as I have been to-day. Going down, however, just below the Capuchin convent, I saw a man on a donkey coming up, with a large basket slung at each side of the saddle in front of him. No one could doubt what was under those cool vine-leaves. He was carrying fresh figs up to the Villa Tuscolana, where some college was making theirvilligiatura. I showed him a few soldi, and he stopped and let me lift the leavesmyself. There they lay with soft cheek pressed to cheek, large, black figs as sweet as honey. The very skins of them would have sweetened your tea. Where we stood a little path that looked like a dry rivulet-bed led off under the wall of the convent grounds. When I asked where it went, they answered, ‘To the Madonna.’ We will go there on our way down. Meantime, has Isabel nothing hospitable to say to us?”

Miss Vane displayed immediately the luncheon she had been detailed to prepare, a bottle of Orvieto, only less delicate because richer than champagne, a basket ofcianbelli, and lastly a box. “In the name of the prophet, figs!” she said, opening it. “They are dried, it is true; but then they are from Smyrna.”

They drankfelicissima festato Bianca, drank to the past and the present, to all the world; and Mr. Vane, when their little feast was ended, slipped a beautiful ring on his younger daughter’s finger. “To remember Tusculum by, my dear,” he said; and, looking at her wistfully, seeming to miss some light-heartedness even in her smiles, he added: “Is there anything you lack, child?”

She dropped her face to his arm only in time to hide a blush that covered it. “What could I lack?” she asked.

But a few minutes afterward, while the others recalled historical events connected with the place, and the Signora pointed out the cities and mountains by name, the young girl walked away to the Roman side, and stood looking off with longing eyes toward the west. She lacked a voice, a glance, and a smile too dear to lose, and her heart cried out for them. She was not unhappy,for she trusted in God, and in the friend whose unspoken affection absence and estrangement had only strengthened her faith in; but she wanted to see him, or, at least, to know how he fared. It seemed to her at that moment that if she should look off toward that part of the world where he must be, fix her thoughts on him and call him, he would hear her and come. She called him, her tender whisper sending his name out through all the crowding ghosts of antiquity, past pope and king and ambassador, poet and orator, armies thrust back and armies triumphant—the little whisper winged and heralded by a power older and more potent than Tusculum or the mountain whereon its ruins lie.

They went down the steep way again, gathering all the flowers they could find, and, when they reached the shrine at the turn of the Cappucini road, stuck the screen so full of pink, white, and purple blossoms that the faces of Our Lady and the Child could only just be discerned peeping out. Then they turned into the pebbly path under the Cappucini wall, where the woods and briers on one side, and the wall on the other, left them room only to walk in Indian file; came out on the height above beautiful Villa Lancilotti, with another burst of the Campagna before their eyes, and the mountains with their coronets of towns still visible at the northeast over the Borghese Avenue and the solid pile of Mondragone.

Here, set so high on the wall that it had to be reached by two or three stone steps, was the picture of the Madonna, looking off from its almost inaccessible height over the surrounding country. It was visible from the villas below, and manya faithful soul far away had breathed a prayer to Mary at sight of it, though nothing was visible to him but the curve of high, white wall over the trees, and the square frame of the picture. Now and then a devout soul came through the lonely and thorny path to the very foot of the shrine, and left a prayer and a flower there.

The others gave their flowers to Bianca, who climbed the steps, and set a border of bloom inside the frame, and pushed a flower through the wires to touch the Madonna’s hand, and set a little ring of yellow blossoms where it might look like a crown.

As she stood on that height, visible as a speck only if one had looked up from the villa, smiling to herself happily while she performed her sweet and unaccustomed task, down in the town below, a speck like herself, stood a man leaning against the eagle-crested arch of the Borghese Villa gate, and watching her through a glass. He saw the slight, graceful form, whose every motion was so well known to him; saw the ribbon flutter in her uncovered hair, the little gray mantle dropped off the gray dress into the hands of the group at the foot of the steps; saw the arms raised to fix flower after flower; finally, when she turnedto come down, fancied that he saw her smile and blush of pleasure, and, conquered by his imagination, dropped the glass and held out his arms, for it seemed that she was stepping down to him.

The party went home tired and satisfied, and did not go out again that day. It was pleasure enough to sit in the westward windows as the afternoon waned and watch the sun go down, and see how the mist that for ever lies over the Campagna caught his light till, when he burned on the horizon in one tangle of radiating gold, the whole wide space looked as if a steady rainbow had been straightened and drawn across it, every color in its order, glowing stratum upon stratum pressed over sea and city and vineyard, blurring all with a splendid haze, till the earth was brighter than even the cloudless sky.

“It is so beautiful that even the stars come out before their time to look,” the Signora said. “Your Madonna on the wall can see it too, Bianca. But as for the poor Madonna in her nest of trees, she can see nothing but green and flowers.”

“I wonder why I prefer the Madonna of the wall?” asked Bianca dreamily. “I feel happy thinking of it.”

TO BE CONTINUED.

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