“I want to hear those sonnets,” said Catherine, quite seriously, as though the likeness between herself and Laura had struck her as the most natural thing in the world.  “Can you remember them?”

“I think I could.  Don’t find fault with me if you dislike the moral.  I approve it because, like Petrarch, I am a bit of a churchman, but I don’t know what you may think of a lover who begins by putting his mistress on the same footing with his deity and ends by groaning over the time he has thrown away on her.”

“Not to her face?” said Esther.

“Worse!  He saw her in church and wrote to her face something like this: 

’As sight of God is the eternal life,
Nor more we ask, nor more to wish we dare,
So, lady, sight of thee,’

and so on, or words to that effect.  Yet after she was dead he said he had wasted his life in loving her.  I remember the whole of the sonnet because it cost me two days’ labor in the railway between Avignon and Nice.  It runs like this:—­

’For my lost life lamenting now I go,
Which I have placed in loving mortal thing,
Soaring to no high flight, although the wing
Had strength to rise and loftier sweep to show. 
Oh!  Thou that seest my mean life and low! 
Invisible!  Immortal!  Heaven’s king! 
To this weak, pathless spirit, succor bring,
And on its earthly faults thy grace bestow! 
That I, who lived in tempest and in fear,
May die in port and peace; and if it be
That life was vain, at least let death be dear! 
In these few days that yet remain to me,
And in death’s terrors, may thy hand be near! 
Thou knowest that I have no hope but thee!’

In the Italian this is very great poetry, Miss Brooke, and if you don’t think it so in my English, try and see if you can do better.”

“Very well,” said Catherine, coolly.  “I’ve no doubt we can do it just as well as you and Mr. Wharton.  Can’t we, Esther?”

“You are impudent enough to make St. Cecilia blush,” said Esther, who happened to be wondering whether she might dare to put a little blush into the cheeks of the figure on which she was painting.  “You never read a word of Italian in your little life.”

“No!  But you have!” replied Catherine, as though this were final.

“The libretto of Lucia!” said Esther with scorn.

“No matter!” resumed Catherine.  “Bring me the books, Mr. Hazard, and I will translate one of those sonnets if I have to shut up Esther in a dark closet.”

“Catherine!  Don’t make me ridiculous!” said Esther; but Catherine was inspired by an idea, and would not be stopped.

“Bring me the volume now, Mr. Hazard!  You shall have your sonnet for Sunday’s sermon.”

“Don’t do it, Mr. Hazard!” exhorted Esther solemnly.  “It is one of her Colorado jokes.  She does not know what a sonnet is.  She thinks it some kind of cattle-punching.”

“If I do not give you that sonnet,” cried Catherine, “I will give you leave to have me painted as much like an old skeleton as Mr. Wharton chooses.”