e mob, and with him
I have passed the hours since I saw you. Not that I ever knew nor
suspected it, Marietta: if I had, I had never dared to speak as I did
about ourselves and our wayward lives in such a presence. I had felt
these themes ignoble.'

'How so?' cried she eagerly. 'You have ever told me that art was an
ennobling and a glorious thing; that after those whose genius embodied
grand conceptions, came he who gave them utterance. How often have you
said, the poet lives but half in men's hearts whose verses have not
found some meet interpreter; with words like these have you stimulated
me to study, and now----'

'And now,' said he, sighing drearily, 'I wake to feel what a mere
mockery it is:

'"Tra l'ombra e bella L'istessa stella
Che in faccia del sole Non si miro."

Ah, _Marietta mia_, he who creates is alone an artist!'

The girl bent her head upon her bosom, and while her long waving curls
fell loosely over him, she sobbed bitterly. Gerald clasped her closer to
his heart, but never spoke a syllable.

'I ever thought it would be so,' murmured she at last: 'I felt that
in this sense of birth and blood you boasted of, would one day come a
feeling of shame to be the companion of such as me. It is not from art
itself you turn away, it is the company of the strolling actor that you
shun.'

'And who or what am I that I should do so?' said Gerald boldly. 'When,
or where, have I known such happiness as with you, Marietta? Bethink you
of the hours we have passed together, poring over these dear old books
there, enriching our hearts with noble thoughts, and making the poet the
interpreter between us? Telling, too, in the fervour we spoke his lines,
how tenderly we felt them; as Metastasio says:

'"And as we lisped the verse along,
Learning to love."'

'And now it is over,' said she, with a sigh of deep despondency.

'Why so? Shall I, in learning to know the great and the illustrious--to
feel how their own high thoughts sway and rule them--be less worthy of
your love? The poet told me, to-night, that I declaimed his lines well;
but who taught me to feel them, _Marietta mia!_' And he kissed her
cheek, bathed as it was and seamed with, hot tears. Again he tried to
bring back the dream of the past, and their oft-projected scheme
of life; but he urged the theme no longer as of old; and even when
describing the world they were about to fly from, his words trembled
with the emotion that swelle