atalie, it is time to be thinking of your
toilet. See, the sun is already sinking behind the pines, and the
sky begins to redden! The time to go will soon arrive, and your first
triumph awaits you!"

"Oh, it will not have long to wait," said Natalie, laughing, and, light
and graceful as a gazelle, she tripped to the house.

Count Paulo gazed after her with a melancholy rapture. "And I am to
leave this angel," thought he, "to lose the brightest and noblest jewel
of my life, and drive myself out of paradise. And wherefore all this?
Perhaps to chase a phantom that will never become a reality, to follow
a chimera which may be only a meteor that dances before me and dissolves
into mist when I think to reach it? No, no, the world is not worth
so much that one should sell himself and his soul's happiness for its
splendor and its greatness. Natalie herself shall decide. Loves she me,
and is she satisfied with the quiet circumscribed existence that I
can henceforth only offer her, then away, ye vain dreams and ye proud
desires for greatness; then shall I be, if not the greatest, certainly
the happiest of human beings!"

It was a wonderfully brilliant festival that Cardinal Bernis had to-day
prepared for his guests--a festival hitherto unequalled in Rome. The
walls were decorated with garlands and festoons of flowers, the flaming
candelabras among which found their reflection in the tall Venetian
mirrors that rose in their golden frames from the floor to the ceilings;
and in the corners of the rooms were niches, here furnished with
orange-trees, and there with heavy silk curtains, behind which were
grottoes adorned with shells, in the midst of which were fountains where
splashed waters rendered fragrant by oil of roses and other essences.
And ever-new surprises, new grottoes and groves in those rich halls
offered themselves to the eyes of the beholders. Now one suddenly found
himself in a quiet boudoir lighted only by a solitary lamp, where the
most artistic engravings and the rarest drawings were spread out upon
a table; then again one entered a hall sparkling with a thousand lights
and resounding with music, where the gayly-dressed crowd undulated in
mazy waves; then again grottoes opened here and there, or one stepped
out through the open doors into the garden where one could enjoy the
balsamic coolness of the evening in walks brilliantly lighted with
colored lamps, or listen to the music of performers concealed in the
shru