hat if your heart should become
interested in him?"

"Oh, in that case," answered Maria Dolores, lightly, her chin a little
in the air, "I should marry him--if he asked me."

"What!" cried Frau Brandt, half rising from her chair.

"Yes," said Maria Dolores, cheerfully unexcited. "He is a man of
breeding and education, even if he isn't noble. If I loved a man, I
shouldn't give one thought to his birth. I'm tired of all our Austrian
insistence upon birth, upon birth and quarterings and precedencies. If
ever I love, I shall love some one just for what he is, for what God has
made him, and for nothing else. It wouldn't matter if his father were a
cobbler--if I loved him, I'd marry him." Her chin higher in the air, she
had every appearance of meaning what she said.

Frau Brandt had sunk back in her chair, and was nodding her white-capped
old head again.

"Oh, my child, my child," she grieved. "Will you never rid your fancy of
these high-flown, unpractical, romantic whimsies? It all comes of
reading poetry." She herself, good woman, read little but her prayers.

"Oh, my dear true Heart," responded Maria Dolores, laughing. She crossed
the room, and placed her hand affectionately upon Frau Brandt's
shoulder. "My dearest old Nurse! Do not distress yourself. This is not
yet a question of actuality. Let us not cry before we are hurt." And she
stooped, and kissed her nurse's brown old brow.

But afterwards she stood looking with great pensiveness out of the
window, stood so for a long while; and I fancy there was a softer glow
than ever in her soft-glowing eyes, and perhaps a livelier rose in her
pale-rose cheeks.

"What are you thinking so deeply about?" Frau Brandt asked by-and-by.

Maria Dolores woke with a little start, and turned from the window, and
laughed again.

"Oh, thinking about my cobbler's son, of course," she said.

VI

Annunziata, seeking him to announce that supper was ready, found John,
seated in his chamber of dead ladies, his arms folded, his legs crossed,
his eyes fixed, a frown upon his prone brow; his spirit apparently rapt
in a brown study.

"Eh! Prospero!" she called.

Whereat he came to himself glanced up, glanced round, changed his
posture, and finally, rising, blew his preoccupations from him in a
deep, deep sigh.

"Oh, what a sigh!" marvelled Annunziata, making big eyes. "What are you
sighing so hard for?"

John looked at her, and smiled.

"Sighing for my miller's daughter