that as fine as your boasted Campagna?']

Some old packing-cases filled with mould sufficed to nourish a few stocks
and carnations, a rose or two, and a mass of mignonette, which possibly,
like the children of the poor, grew up sturdy and healthy from some of the
adverse circumstances of their condition. It was a very favourite spot with
her; and if she came hither in her happiest moments, it was here also her
saddest hours were passed, sure that in the cares and employments of her
loved plants she would find solace and consolation. It was at this window
Kate now sat with Nina, looking over the vast plain, on which a rich
moonlight was streaming, the shadows of fast-flitting clouds throwing
strange and fanciful effects over a space almost wide enough to be a
prairie.

'What a deal have mere names to do with our imaginations, Nina!' said Kate.
'Is not that boundless sweep before us as fine as your boasted Campagna?
Does not the night wind career over it as joyfully, and is not the
moonlight as picturesque in its breaks by turf-clamp and hillock as by
ruined wall and tottering temple? In a word, are not we as well here, to
drink in all this delicious silence, as if we were sitting on your loved
Pincian?'

'Don't ask me to share such heresies. I see nothing out there but bleak
desolation. I don't know if it ever had a past; I can almost swear it will
have no future. Let us not talk of it.'

'What shall we talk of?' asked Kate, with an arch smile.

'You know well enough what led me up here. I want to hear what you know of
that strange man Dick brought here to-day to dinner.'

'I never saw him before--never even heard of him.'

'Do you like him?'

'I have scarcely seen him.'

'Don't be so guarded and reserved. Tell me frankly the impression he makes
on you. Is he not vulgar--very vulgar?'

'How should I say, Nina? Of all the people you ever met, who knows so
little of the habits of society as myself? Those fine gentlemen who were
here the other day shocked my ignorance by numberless little displays
of indifference. Yet I can feel that they must have been paragons of
good-breeding, and that what I believed to be a very cool self-sufficiency,
was in reality the very latest London version of good manners.'

'Oh, you did not like that charming carelessness of Englishmen that goes
where it likes and when it likes, that does not wait to be answered when it
questions, and only insists on one thing, which is--"not to be