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! 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.