But nevertheless she was crowned.  She still stood upon the capitol, with the laurel-crown upon her brow, cheered by her respectable protectors and friends.  But the people joined not in those cheers, and, as the exulting shouts ceased, there swelled up to the laurel-crowned poetess, from thousands of voices, a thundering laugh of scorn, and this scornful laugh, this hissing and howling of the people, accompanied her upon her return from the capitol, following her through the streets to her own door.  The people had judged her!

Corilla was no poetess by the grace of God, and only by the grace of man had she been crowned as queen of poesy!

Mortified, crushed, and enraged, she fled from Rome to Florence.  She knew how to flatter the great and win princes.  She was a princess-poetess, and the people rejected her!

But the laurel was hers.  She was sought and esteemed, the princes admired her, and Catharine of Russia fulfilled the promise Orloff had made the improvisatrice in the name of the empress.  Corilla received a pension from Russia.  Russia has always promptly and liberally paid those who have sold themselves and rendered services to her.  Russia is very rich, and can always send so many thousands of her best and noblest to work in the mines of Siberia, that she can never lack means for paying her spies and agents.

THE RUSSIAN OFFICER

With Carlo’s death, Natalie had lost her last friend; with the stolen money and diamonds, Marianne was robbed of her last pecuniary means.  But Natalie paid no attention to Marianne’s lamentations.  What cared she for poverty and destitution—­what knew she of these outward treasures, of this wealth consisting in gold and jewels?  Natalie knew only that she had been robbed of a noble, spiritual possession—­that they had murdered the friend who had consecrated himself to her with such true and devoted love, and, weeping over his body, she dedicated to him the tribute of a tear of the purest gratitude, of saddest lamentation.

But so imperfect is the world that it often leaves no time for mourning—­that in the midst of our sorrow it causes us to hear the prosaic voices of reality and necessity, compelling us to dry our eyes and turning our thoughts from painfully-sweet remembrances of a lost happiness to the realities of practical life.

Natalie’s delicately-sensitive soul was to experience this rough contact of reality, and, with an internal shudder, must she bend under the rough hand of the present.

Pale, breathless, trembling, rushed Marianne into the room where Natalie, in solitary mourning, was weeping for her lost friend.

“We are ruined, hopelessly ruined!” screamed Marianne.  “They will drive us from our last possession, they will turn us out of our house!  All the misfortunes of the whole world break over and crush us!”

The young maiden looked at her with a calm, clear glance.