his little drawing, doubtless by Perugino, just a sketch of
an angel for an Annunciation; notice the purity of outline, the ideal
atmosphere in which the painter lives and with which he impregnates his
work. You see he comes of a school of poets and mystics, gifted with
a second sight which enabled them to beautify this world and raise
themselves above it."

I was pleased with my little lecture, and so was Jeanne. I could tell
it by her surprised expression, and by the looks she cast toward her
father, who was still taking notes, to see whether she might go on with
her first lesson in art.

He smiled in a friendly way, which meant:

"I'm happy here, my dear, thank you; 'va piano va sano'."

This was as good as permission. We went on our way, saluting, as we
passed, Tintoretto and Titian, Veronese and Andrea Solari, old Cimabue,
and a few early paintings of angular virgins on golden backgrounds.

Jeanne was no longer bored.

"And is this," she would say, "another Venetian, or a Lombard, or a
Florentine?"

We soon completed the round of the first room, and made our way into the
gallery beyond, devoted to sculpture. The marble gods and goddesses,
the lovely fragments of frieze or cornice from the excavations at
Rome, Pompeii, or Greece, had but a moderate interest for Mademoiselle
Charnot. She never gave more than one glance to each statue, to some
none at all.

We soon came to the end of the gallery, and the door which gave access
into the second room of paintings.

Suddenly Jeanne gave an exclamation of surprise.

"What is that?" she said.

Beneath the large and lofty window, fanned on the outside by leafy
branches, a wooden panel, bearing an inscription, stood upright against
the wall. The words were painted in black on a white ground, and
arranged with considerable skill, after the style of the classic
epitaphs which the Italians still cultivate.

I drew aside the folds of a curtain:

"It is one of those memorial tablets, Mademoiselle, such as people hang
up in this part of the country upon the church doors on the day of the
funeral. It means:

"To thee, Rafaella Dannegianti--who, aged twenty years and few
months--having fully experienced the sorrows and illusions of this
world--on January 6--like an angel longing for its heavenly home--didst
wing thy way to God in peace and happiness--the clergy of Desioand the
laborers and artificers of the noble house of Dannegianti--tender these
last solemn offic