What could this mean? Was it a foreboding? When the last wrapping was carefully laid aside, she opened her eyes with a great effort and looked upon the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. On the little table directly opposite her, stood a figure about eight inches high,--exquisite, dazzling! "A prince!" she thought at first; for he was richly dressed, had a noble air, and on his short dark curls he wore a crown. But no; he was not a prince. As she looked at him again she realized that his crown was made of laurels; then she saw too that he held a violin in his hand. He was something greater than a prince; he was an artist. The master stood off and looked at him with beaming joy, and the little shepherdess felt her admiration increase with corroboration. Then he drew from his pocket a pink wax taper, which he fitted into the laurel crown. When it was lighted it shed a soft radiance. "What a beautiful idea!" thought the shepherdess; "that is the halo of art, glorifying, transfiguring everything." The master then blew out the light, and smiling complacently, reached up to the chandelier. Just as he was about to turn out the gas, the little artist looked up and saw the shepherdess,--one long look of surprise and eagerness; their glances met, and in that look they understood each other. Through the darkness of that whole night he played her beautiful strains of dreamy music that opened to her visions of blue skies and balmy orange groves; for he came from Italy, where the very air must be heavy with poetry and love, she thought. He told her wonderful tales with his violin. He alternately flooded her mind with moonlight and fairies, or peopled her fancy with vague forms of sorrow that filled her little breast with sobs. What a rapturous night that was! A bewitched moonbeam that peered in through a broken slat in the blind lay there entranced. In the pauses of the music the plaster wings of the little Psyche quivered audibly. As for the shepherdess, something had permeated her soul like a subtile essence, and opened one by one great vistas of feeling of which she had never dreamed even in the boldest flights of her imaginings. All her senses seemed suddenly to have grown exquisitely acute. "What a bursting heart there must be behind it all!" she thought. "What a fund of sentiment! What must he feel who, with a stroke of his bow, can change the aspect of the world! It is he! It is he at last!"