It can hardly be doubted,—­Ludovico could hardly be blamed for the persuasion—­that Paolina did like his visits.  It may be pretty safely assumed that those blushes, which greeted the appearance of his head above the planks as he climbed to the scaffolding, were not painful blushes.  How early in those eight months it came to pass that her heart leaped at the click of the huge old key in the lock, as the sacristan admitted Ludovico by a turn of it which, as she had well learned, heralded his coming, it might be hard to say.  Paolina herself could not probably have told this to her own heart.  But that such had come to be the case long before the evening when the Marchese Lamberto sought his nephew at the Circolo, and could not find him, can hardly be doubted.

Thus much having been admitted, it seems as if there might be reason to fear that Paolina may appear worthy of censure to those of her own sex, to whom her story is here commended, to a degree which truth, and an acquaintance with times, places, and national manners, would not quite justify.  But in these matters of national appreciation, of fitness and unfitness, and of propriety and impropriety, the nuances are so fine and subtle, that it is somewhat difficult, in trying to explain them, to say just what one means without seeming to say more than one means.

One thing is clear.  Paolina was as thoroughly and essentially modest and innocent a girl as ever breathed; but she was so “by the grace of God,”—­from natural idiosyncrasy and instinctive purity of heart, that is to say, rather than from teaching of any kind, or from any knowledge of good or evil.  She was an orphan, the child of parents who were “nobody,” and she was left in the world to find her own way in it as she could.  So much the more, replies the prudent English matron, ought she to have been extra careful lest the breath of misconception should even for a passing moment sully her.  It is the sentiment of a people, who, “aristocratic” as they may be, do really feel that that which is best and purest in the highest lady of the land may be, and should be, also the heritage of lowliest.  But such is not practically the feeling in those social latitudes where Paolina was born and bred.

The breath that tarnishes the clear mirror of a noble damsel’s name, says and teaches that social feeling, brings dishonour to a noble race; and she has failed in her duty to her race.  But who could be injured by any light word spoken or light thought of such an one as poor Paolina?  She was an “artist.”  What treason to art, what lese-majeste against the beautiful in every one of its manifestations, to conceive that in that fact any reason was to be found why a less nice conduct in such matters should be expected of her!  And yet, for reasons which it would take a volume to elucidate, so it is, that in the countries where art is deemed to be most at home, and where it is in the largest degree the occupation of large sections