All turned their heads to listen.  “Bravo!  Bravissimo!  A delicious idea!” cried the merry connoisseur of Art, running from one to another to arrange a rustic divertissement, as he called it.  He made a beginning himself by leading out the lady who had played the guitar in the arbor.  Thereupon he began to dance with extraordinary artistic skill, and describe all sorts of letters on the grass with the points of his toes, really trilling with his feet, and now and then jumping pretty high in the air.  But he soon had enough of it, for he was rather corpulent.  His jumps grew fewer and clumsier, until at last he withdrew from the circle, puffing violently, and mopping the moisture from his forehead with a snowy pocket-handkerchief.  Meanwhile, the young man, who had regained his composure, brought from the inn some castanets, and before I was aware all were dancing merrily beneath the trees.  The sun had set, but the crimson sky in the west cast bright reflections among the shadows, and upon the old walls and the half-buried columns covered with ivy in the depths of the garden, while below the vineyards we could see the Eternal City bathed in the evening glow.  The dance in the still, clear air was charming, and my heart within me laughed to see how the slender girls and the lady’s-maid glided among the trees with arms upraised like heathen wood-nymphs, and kept time to the music with their castanets.  At last I could no longer restrain myself; I joined their ranks, and danced away merrily, still fiddling all the time.

I had been hopping about thus for some minutes, not noticing that the others were beginning to be tired and were dropping out of the dance, when I felt some one twitch me by the coat-tail.  It was the lady’s-maid.  “Don’t be a fool,” she said under her breath; “you are jumping about like a kid!  Read your note, and come soon; the beautiful young Countess awaits you.”  She slipped out of the garden in the twilight and vanished among the vineyards.

My heart beat fast; I longed to follow her.  Fortunately, a waiter was just lighting the lantern over the garden gate.  I took out my note, which contained a somewhat rudely penciled plan of the gate and the streets leading to it, just as I had been directed by the lady’s-maid, and in addition the words “Eleven o’clock, at the little door.”

Two long hours to wait!  Nevertheless I should have set out immediately, for I could not stay still, had not the painter, who had brought me hither, rushed up.  “Did you speak to the girl?” he asked.  “I cannot see her now.  It was the German Countess’s maid.”  “Hush, hush!” I replied; “the Countess is still in Rome.”  “So much the better,” said the painter; “come then and drink her health.”  And in spite of all I could say he forced me to return to the garden with him.