one."

"Italy is full of its troubles, _mia madre_. He is the exile of a noble
family,--no other beggar would be so haughty," looked up and answered
Eve, laughing between her bars. "Mamma, what different beings different
meridians make!" she exclaimed, dropping her music. "Is he so sweet and
lofty and fiery because he has lived in the shadow of old
temples,--because, if he stumbled over a pebble in the street, it was
the marble fragment of a goddess,--because the clay of which he is made
has so many times been moulded into heroes?"

"Are there no further fancies with which you can invest an
image-vender?"

"But he is unique. Did you ever see any one like him? Daily beauty has
made him beautiful. Is that what the Doctor means, when he says a
Corinthian pillar in the market-place would educate a generation better
than a pulpit would?"

"They have both in Rome," said her mother, with meaning.

"And, in spite of them, perhaps our hero cannot spell! Yet he is more
accomplished than we, mamma. He speaks Italian beautifully," said she,
with _espieglerie_.

"But hardly Tuscan."

"Silver speech for all that. I have reached the end of my idioms,
though. I always said school was good for something, if one could only
find it out," she archly cried, her little fingers running in arpeggios
up the keys. "To think he understood them so! Then Dante's women would."

"Heaven forbid!"

"How his face glows at them,--like a light behind a mask! It is quite
the opera, when he comes. I will sing to him an aria, and then it will
make a scene."

"You are a madcap. What do you want a scene for?"

"Spice. When my voice fills his handsome eyes with tears, he makes me an
artist; when he turns upon you in that sudden, ardent air, he brings a
sting of foreign fire into this quiet summer noon."

"Amuse yourself sparingly with other people's emotions, Eve."

"Especially when they are suave as olive-oil, pungent as cherry-cordial,
and ready to blaze with a spark, you know. Ah, it is all as interesting
to me as when the little sweep last year looked out from the chimney-top
and made the whole sky brim over with his wild music."

Here a clock chimed silverly from below.

"There is the half-hour striking, and you have lost all this time," said
the caressing mother, her fingers lost in the bright locks she lifted.

"Never mind, mother mine," said she, turning in elfish mood to brush her
lips across the frustrated fingers. "Art is long, if