is needless to say how Gerald felt
attracted by the strange adventurous life of which they spoke. The
Babbo, mingling his old convent traditions, his scraps of monkish Latin,
his little fragments of a pious training, with the descriptions of his
subtle craft, was a study the youth delighted in, while from his own
early teaching, it was also a character he could thoroughly appreciate.
Donna Gaetana, indeed, offered little in the way of interest, but did
not Marietta alone compensate for more than this? The wild and fearless
grace of this young girl, daring to the very verge of shamelessness, and
yet with a strange instinctive sense of womanly delicacy about her, that
lifted her, in her raggedness, to a sphere where deference was her due;
her matchless symmetry, her easy motion, a mingled expression of energy
and languor about her, all met happily in one who but needed culture
to have become a great artiste. She possessed, besides, a voice of
exquisite richness, one of those deep-toned organs whose thrilling
expression seems to attain at once the highest triumph of musical art
in the power of exciting the sensibilities: such was that poor neglected
child, as she hovered over the brink where vice and wretchedness and
crime run deep and fast below!

When the meal was over, and the little vessels used in preparing it were
all duly washed and packed, old Gaetana lighted her pipe, and once in
full puff proceeded to drag from a portentous-looking bag a mass of
strange rags, dirty and particoloured, the slashed sleeves and spangled
skirts proclaiming them as 'properties.'

'Clap that velvet cap on thy head, boy, and let's see what thou lookest
like,' cried she, handing Gerald a velvet hat, looped up in front, and
ornamented with an ostrich feather.

'What for?' cried he rudely; 'I am no mountebank.' And then, as he
caught Marietta's eyes, a deep blush burned all over his face, and he
said, in a voice of shame, 'To be sure! Anything you like. I'll wear
this too,' and he snatched up a tawdry mantle and threw it over his
shoulders.

'_Come e bellino!_' said Marietta, as she clasped her hands across her
bosom, and gazed on him in a sort of rapture. 'He's like Paolo in the
Francesca,' muttered she.

'He'll never be Chico,' growled out the hag. 'Birbante that he was, who
'll ever jump through nine hoops with A lighted taper in his hand? Oh,
_Assassino!_ it won't serve you now!'

'Do you know Paolo's speech?' whispered Marietta