“Why, your veil covers it,” Isabel said. “But there’s a bright garnet and gold pin at the top.” Bianca lifted her arms to loosen the veil, took the gold hairpin out and kissed it. “He must have touched it,” she said, “and so it has been blessed. Do you know, Signora, what thought came into my mind at the moment? I thought as he touched me, ‘It is the hand that holds the keys of purgatory and of heaven!’” “My own thought!” her friend exclaimed. “I had the same benediction once, and it set me rhyming. I do not set up for a poet, you know, but there are feelings that will sing in spite of one. This was one, and I must show you the lines some time soon, to see if they express you. I don’t know where they are.” “I know where something of yours is,” Bianca said eagerly. “I saw it in your blotting-book, and had to call up all my honesty not to read it. Reward me now! I will bring it.” She looked so bright and coaxing, and the others so cordially joined in her request, that the Signora could not but consent, though usually shy of reading her unpublished productions to any one. “How I like hot noons!” she sighed through a smile of languid contentment, leaning back in her chair, and dropping in her lap the folded paper Bianca had brought her. “I found out the charm of them when I was in Frascati. At this early season the heat of the city, too, is good――a pure scorch and scald. In August it is likely to be thick and morbid. That first noon in Frascati was a new experience to me. I went to see Villa Torlonia, which was open to the public only between the hours of eleven and five――a time when scarcely any one, especially any Italian, wants to go out in hot weather. I wished to see the villa, however, and I went, stealing along the shadowy edges of streets, and down a long stairway street that is nearly or always shaded by the tall houses at either side and the hill behind, catching my breath as I passed through the furnace of sunshine in the open _piazza_, finally, with my face in a flame, stepping under the great trees inside the gate, and pausing to refresh myself a little before going on. There was still the open terrace to pass, and the grand unshaded steps to ascend; but it was easier to go forward than back, for a few minutes would bring me to avenues as dim as _Ave Maria_ time. I stood a little and dreaded the sun. The _casino_ and the gravel of the terrace and the steps were reflecting it so that one might almost have fancied the rays clashed on each other in the midst of the opening. The rose-trees in the flower-garden looked as if they bore clusters of fire-coals, and some sort of flowering tree in the green spaces between the stairs seemed to be breaking out into flame with its red and yellow blossoms. I remembered Mrs. Browning’s “‘The flowers that burn, and the trees that aspire, And the insects made of a song or a fire.’”