Minna at eight-and-twenty was nearly alone in the world. In Rome, in Florence, in many another city in which art is studied and in which the materials for that study abound, there are crowds of English women, American women, and even German women, working in their own studios or in those of their masters, and generally, of what age soever, unmarried. One usually knows this by a certain something in their aspect or manner--a something indefinable and indescribable. That something was not present in Minna Hastings, and, indeed, there was a plain gold ring, the only one she wore, on the third finger of the left hand--a ring which had been placed there nine years ago by Rupert Hastings, whom she had married, and who had been her husband for exactly eighteen months, having then died very suddenly of an inflammation of the lungs. Minna had always been a person who might have had many friends--indeed, there were many who were ready and wishful to be her friends. She had been, perhaps, less eager than they. In the time of her trouble, however, she had clung to one, a distant relative of her husband’s, a certain Mrs. Charrington, and with her she had, after the first horror of her loss had somewhat abated, travelled, seeking to forget enough to be able to take up something like an everyday life again, that being the consummation most devoutly sought after by most people whose lives and feelings have been crushed or shaken out of that everyday life into a higher, rarer atmosphere. Nine months after her husband’s death, in the month of September, she had come with her friend to Rome. Mrs. Charrington lived there. Minna had never seen the place before. In a short time the mighty spell of the city of cities had begun its work, as was natural enough, on a girl of barely one-and-twenty--eager, steeped to her soul in the inborn love of art, and, despite the hard blows of Fate, filled to overflowing with the strength, the interest, and the boundless elasticity of youth. Her old love of modelling, in which she had been considered to have a very pretty trick, returned. She began to study in earnest, under a well-known modern sculptor, and from that hour her future seemed settled.