in the woods alone, reading some favourite book, to almost any other pleasure,—­and as for the admiration which she won by a look or turn of her head wherever she went, nothing in all the world so utterly bored her as this influence of her own charm.  For she had tried men and found them wanting.  With all the pent-up passion of her woman’s soul she longed to be loved,—­but what she understood by love was a much purer and more exalted emotion than is common among men and women.  She was suffering just now from an intense and overpowering ennui.  Rome was beautiful, she averred, but dull.  Stretching her fair white arms out over the impervious stone-angels she said this, and more than this, to someone within the room, who answered her in one of the most delightfully toned voices in the world—­a voice that charmed the ear by its first cadences, and left the listener fascinated into believing that its music was the expression of a perfectly harmonious mind.

“You seem very discontented,” said the voice, speaking in English, “But really your pathway is one of roses!”

“You think so?” and Sylvie turned her head quickly round and looked at her companion, a handsome little man of some thirty-five years of age, who stretching himself lazily full length in an arm-chair was toying with the silky ears of an exceedingly minute Japanese spaniel, Sylvie’s great pet and constant companion.  “Oh, mon Dieu!  You, artist and idealist though you are—­or shall I say as you are supposed to be,” and she laughed a little, “you are like all the rest of your sex!  Just because you see a woman able to smile and make herself agreeable to her friends, and wear pretty clothes, and exchange all the bon mots of badinage and every-day flirtation, you imagine it impossible for her to have any sorrow!”

“There is only one sorrow possible to a woman,” replied the gentleman, who was no other than Florian Varillo, the ideal of Angela Sovrani’s life, smiling as he spoke with a look in his eyes which conveyed an almost amorous meaning.

Sylvie left the balcony abruptly, and swept back into the room, looking a charming figure of sylph-like slenderness and elegance in her clinging gown of soft white satin showered over with lace and pearls.

“Only one sorrow!” she echoed, “And that is—?”

“Inability to win love, or to awaken desire!” replied Varillo, still smiling.

The pretty Comtesse raised her golden head a little more proudly, with the air of a lily lifting itself to the light on its stem—­her deep blue eyes flashed.

“I certainly cannot complain on that score!” she said, with a touch of malice as well as coldness—­“But the fact that men lose their heads about me does not make me in the least happy.”