"
"But will the people give me as true and cordial answers as my trees and
flowers?" asked Natalie, thoughtfully.
"They will say to you more beautiful and more flattering things," said
Paulo, smiling. "But now, Natalie, it is time to be thinking of your
toilet. See, the sun is already sinking behind the pines, and the
sky begins to redden! The time to go will soon arrive, and your first
triumph awaits you!"
"Oh, it will not have long to wait," said Natalie, laughing, and, light
and graceful as a gazelle, she tripped to the house.
Count Paulo gazed after her with a melancholy rapture. "And I am to
leave this angel," thought he, "to lose the brightest and noblest jewel
of my life, and drive myself out of paradise. And wherefore all this?
Perhaps to chase a phantom that will never become a reality, to follow
a chimera which may be only a meteor that dances before me and dissolves
into mist when I think to reach it? No, no, the world is not worth
so much that one should sell himself and his soul's happiness for its
splendor and its greatness. Natalie herself shall decide. Loves she me,
and is she satisfied with the quiet circumscribed existence that I
can henceforth only offer her, then away, ye vain dreams and ye proud
desires for greatness; then shall I be, if not the greatest, certainly
the happiest of human beings!"
It was a wonderfully brilliant festival that Cardinal Bernis had to-day
prepared for his guests--a festival hitherto unequalled in Rome.
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