Some account of the conversation there may perhaps serve the purpose of saving all necessity for a detailed account of the intercourse which had taken place between Ludovico and Paolina during the last eight months.  The story of it will be sufficiently understood from a peep at its result.

CHAPTER VII

The Teaching of a Great Love

Paolina had been working all day in the church of San Vitale.  She had very nearly completed the copies she was to make there; and they were the most important in extent of all she had engaged to execute.  It had been necessary to erect a scaffolding for the purpose of bringing the artist sufficiently near to her subject; and the permission to have this done had been obtained by the all-powerful interest of the Marchese Lamberto.  Many an hour had Ludovico passed on that scaffolding by the artist’s side as she plied her slow and laborious task; and many a “Paul” had the old sacristan pocketed with a grin of understanding, as he had opened the door of the church to the young Marchese, the object of whose visit he had long since learned to understand.

And Paolina herself?  Did she approve of these visits made thus in the perfect seclusion of that old church at the hours when its doors were shut to the public?  Did she like the hours so spent in tete-a-tete conversation with the handsome young Marchese?  She, who had so readily found the means to make the entreprenant Conte Leandro keep his distance, and had succeeded in disembarrassing herself of him altogether,—­could she find no possible means for avoiding the assiduities of the Marchese Ludovico; could she not at least have induced old Orsola to accompany her in the church of San Vitale, as she had accompanied her in the gallery at Venice?

Perhaps old Orsola did not like climbing up a ladder to a scaffolding.  Perhaps she had the superstitious dislike to an empty, and lonely church not uncommon to uneducated Italians.  The fact was at all events that, even after Ludovico had, upon more than one occasion, brought the rushing blood into the dark face of Paolina by surprising her at her work on the scaffolding near the vaults of the church, old Orsola never made her appearance there.  She was always at her place on one side of the fire during the visits of the Marchese to the quartiere in the Strada di Santa Eufemia in the evening; but it was equally true that she almost always went to sleep.

It is so natural and so desirable that the old should sleep under such circumstances and on such occasions!  It is so evidently for the benefit of all the parties concerned, that the tendency may be reckoned among the instances of beneficent adaptation with which the whole order of Nature is filled!