“From Venice, father?  Did you come from Venice?” asked Paolina, eagerly.

“From La bella Venezia I came, daughter—­fourteen years ago.  And once in every month I indulge myself by going to the top of our tower—­you can’t see it from this window, it is on the northern side of the church—­and looking out over the north Pineta as far as I can see towards it.  May God and St. Mark grant that no tempter ever offer me the sight of Venice again at the price of my soul’s salvation!  I shall never, never see Venice more!”

“You must be a Venetian, father, surely, to love it so well?” said Paolina, after a minute or two of silence.

“A Venetian I am—­or was, daughter; as I well knew you were when you first spoke.  Might I ask your name?”

“Paolina Foscarelli, father.  I am an orphan,” said she, softly.

“No!” said the monk, shaking his head, with a deep sigh, and looking earnestly into the girl’s face, but without any appearance of surprise,—­“No; you are not Paolina Foscarelli.”

“Indeed, father, that is my name,” said Paolina, again recurring to her doubt whether the monk was altogether of sound mind, and speaking very quietly and gently; “my father’s name was Foscarelli, and the baptismal name of my mother was the same as mine—­Paolina.”

“Jacopo and Paolina Foscarelli, who lived in the little house at the corner of the Campo di San Pietro and Paolo,” rejoined the monk, speaking in a dreamy far-away kind of manner.

“I have truly heard that they lived there,” said she; “but I was only four years old when they died, one very soon after the other, and since that I have lived with a friend of my mother’s, Signora Steno.”

“The child of Jacopo and Paolina Foscarelli,” said the monk, in the same dreamy tone, and pressing his thin emaciated hands before his eyes as he spoke; “and you have come here to find me?”

“Nay, father, not to find you.  I knew not that the padre guardiano of St. Apollinare was a Venetian.  I came only to copy these pictures for my employer.”

“Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful are the ways of God!  Paolina Foscarelli, daughter of Jacopo and Paolina, I Fabiano—–­”

“Look, padre min!” cried Paolina, suddenly and sharply, turning very pale, and grasping the parapet rung of the scaffolding as she spoke, “look! in the bagarino there on the road, just passing the church; certainly that must be the Signor Marchese Ludovico!—­And with him—­ that lady?—­yes, it is—­it certainly is La Lalli—­the prima donna, who has been singing at the theatre this Carnival.”

She pointed as she spoke to a bagarino that had just passed the western front of the church, and was now moving along the bit of road visible from the high window at which the monk and Paolina were standing.

The tone in which she spoke caused the friar to look at her first, before turning his glance in the direction to which she pointed.  She was pale, and evidently much moved, after a fashion that, taken together with the nature of the objects to which she drew his attention, and the fact that it was the Marchese Ludovico who had come to St. Apollinare to make the arrangements needed for the artist’s work there, left but little doubt in the old man’s mind as to the nature of her emotion.