n him."

"Think you so!" asked Paulo, looking deep into her eyes with a
scrutinizing glance.

She bore his glances with a cheerful and unembarrassed smile, and a
roguish nod of her little head.

"You must certainly wish to paint me again, that you look at me so
earnestly. No, Paulo, I will not sit to you again, you paint me much
too handsome; you make an angel of me, while I am yet only a poor little
thing, who lives but by your mercy, and does not even know her own
name!"

"Angels never have a name, they are only known as angels, and need no
further designation. As there is an Angel Gabriel, so there is an Angel
Natalie!"

"Mocker," said she, laughing, "there are no feminine angels! But now
come, be seated. Here is my guitar, and I will sing you a song for which
Carlo yesterday brought me the melody."

"And the words?" asked Paulo.

"Well, as to the words, they must come in the singing--to-day one set of
words, to-morrow another. Who can know what glows in your heart at any
given hour, and what you may feel in the next, and which will escape you
in words unknown to yourself, and which unconsciously and involuntarily
stream from your lips."

"You are my charming poetess, my Sappho!" exclaimed Paulo, kissing her
hand.

"Ah, would that you spoke true!" said she, with sparkling eyes and a
deeper flush upon her cheeks. "Let me be a poetess like Sappho, and I
would, like her, joyfully leap from the rocks into the sea. Oh, there
are yet poetesses--Carlo has told me of them. All Rome now worships the
great improvisatrice, Corilla. I should like to know her, Paulo, only to
adore her, only to see her in her splendor and her beauty!"

"If you wish it, you shall see her," said Paulo.

"Ah, I shall see her then!" shouted Natalie, and, as if to give
expression to her inward joy, she touched the strings of her guitar, and
in clear tones resounded a jubilant melody. Then she began to sing,
at first in single isolated words and exclamations, which constantly
swelled into more powerful, animated and blissful tones, and finally
flowed into a regular dithyramb. It was a song of jubilee, a sigh of
innocence and happiness; she sang of God and the stars, of happy love,
and of reuniting; of blossom, fragrance, and fanning zephyrs; and in
unconscious, foreboding pain, she sang of the sorrows of love, and the
pangs of renunciation.

All Nature seemed listening to her charming song; no leaflet stirred,
in low murmurs splashed th