d he.

"You and I?" she expostulated, with a shrug of her little grey
shoulders. "_Mache!_ We are not noble."

"Aren't we? How do you know?" asked John. "Anyhow," he impressively
moralized, "we can try to be."

"No," said she, with conclusiveness, with fatalism. "It is no good
trying. Either you are noble or simple,--God makes you so,--you cannot
help it. If I were noble, I should be a contessina. If you were noble,
you would be a gransignore.

"And my unassuming appearance assures you that I'm not?" said he,
smiling.

"If you were a gransignore," she instructed him, "you would never be
such friends with me--you would be too proud."

John laughed.

"You judge people by the company they keep. Well, I will apply the same
principle of judgment to your gossip, Maria Dolores. By-the-by," he
broke off to inquire, "what is her Pagan name?"

"Her Pagan name? What is that?" asked Annunziata.

"Maria Dolores, I take it, is her Christian name, come by in Holy
Baptism," said John. "But I suppose she will have a Pagan name, come by
in the way of the flesh, to round it off with,--just as, for instance, a
certain flame of mine, whose image, when I die, they'll find engraved
upon my heart, has the Pagan name of Casalone."

Annunziata looked up, surprised. "Casalone? That is my name," she said.

"Yes," said John. "Yours will be the image."

Annunziata gave her head a toss. "Maria Dolores did not tell me her
Pagan name," she said.

"At any rate," said he, "to judge by the company she keeps, we may
safely classify her as unborn. She is probably the daughter of a
miller,--of a miller (to judge also a little by the frocks she wears) in
rather a large way of business, who (to judge finally by her cultivated
voice, her knowledge of languages, and her generally distinguished air)
has spared no expense in the matter of her education. I shouldn't
wonder a bit if she could even play the piano."

"No," agreed Annunziata, "that is very likely. But why"--she tilted
upwards her inquisitive little profile--"why should you think she is the
daughter of a miller?"

"Miller," said John, "I use as a generic term. Her father may be a
lexicographer or a dry-salter, a designer of dirigible balloons or a
manufacturer of air-pumps; he may even be a person of independent means,
who lives in a big, new, stuccoed villa in the suburbs of Vienna, and
devotes his leisure to the propagation of orchids: yet all the while a
miller. By miller I mean a