So Will brought her next day from the book-shop in the town the dainty little “Poetry Book of Modern Poets,” in the Tauchnitz edition. He wrote her name in it too; and Linnet took it home, and hid it deep in her box in a white silk handkerchief, and read bits of it by night, very stealthily in her own room, spelling out what it meant with Andreas Hausberger’s dictionary. Long after, she had that precious volume bound in white Florentine vellum, with a crimson _fleur-de-lys_ on the cover, at a house just opposite the Duomo at Florence. But at present she read it in its paper covers. She read other books, too—German books which Will chose for her; not instructive books which were over her head, but poetry and romance and imaginative literature, such as her ardent Tyrolese nature could easily assimilate. Day after day, Will read her aloud something fresh—Undine, the Maid of Orleans, Uhland’s Ballads, Paul Heyse’s short stories—but of all the things he read to her, the one she liked best was a German translation of an English play—a beautiful play by another English poet, whose name was also Will, but who died long ago—a play about two luckless and devoted lovers, called Romeo and Juliet. Linnet cried over that sad story, and Will kissed her tears away; and a little later, when Andreas Hausberger took her to Verona on their way south to Milan, Linnet went of her own accord to see Juliet’s tomb in a courtyard in the town, and wasted much excellent sympathy and sentiment over the shameless imposture of that bare Roman sarcophagus. But she meant very well; and she believed in Juliet even more firmly than she believed in Siegfried and Chriemhild and all the other fine folks to whom Will introduced her. So three weeks passed away, three glorious golden weeks, and day after day, on those lovely hillsides, Linnet saw her lover. At the end of a fortnight, Rue heard, from various friends at other hotels, of a wonderful singer in a Tyrolese troupe, then performing nightly in the various _salons_. “Why, that must surely be Linnet!” she said before Will, to the first friend who mentioned it. “Yes; Linnet—that’s her name,” Rue’s friend assented. “I knew she was in the town,” Will admitted somewhat sheepishly; for he felt as if he were somehow deceiving Rue, though it never would have entered his good, modest head to suppose she herself could care anything about him, except as a poet in whose work she was kind enough to take a friendly interest. “Ah, I should love to hear her again!” Rue cried, enthusiastically. “She sings like a nightingale—such a splendid soprano! Let’s find out where she’ll be to-night, and go round in a body to the hotel to hear her!”