It was a long time before Minna slept that night. She was excited, but pleasantly so. In her gratification over what Signor Giuseppe had said to her about her work, and over his keen appreciation and comprehension of the different mental and emotional phases which had gone to the production of that work, she forgot the rest of the interview and its painfulness, or, if she did not quite forget, it became dim, it fell into the background. Her artist’s soul had been rejoiced, and a stimulus given to her to proceed with the work. She paid less heed than she would have done to poor Signor Giuseppe’s entreaty that she would go away, and to the misery he evidently felt that she should remain as the witness of his humiliation. No, she thought of her work--of the figure of youth and strength and delight in work which had so fascinated her, and felt that now she could go back to it and work at it with passion of pleasure and interest--that absorption which is the life and soul of works of art, and without having had which put into them they can never interest and delight others, let their technique be never so perfect, their proportions never so correct. When at last she did go to sleep it was to dream pleasant dreams and wake refreshed, glad, and eager to begin again. She was ready to set out betimes, and was walking quickly along the passage, which went from her quarter of the house to the front door, when she encountered, coming slowly along towards her, a young girl, whom she had never heretofore seen in the house. She was tall, and had the early developed figure and air of a young Italian woman. She was probably not more than sixteen, though she looked twenty. She had an exquisitely beautiful complexion, fair but pale--almost without even the faintest rose-tinge. She had also splendid waving nut-brown hair, which had in it glints of gold; dark eyes, which might have been either gray or blue, or even black, but which were certainly not brown; thick dark eyebrows, a delicate little aquiline nose, and a mouth as yet undecided in expression, but agreeable rather than actually beautiful in shape. She was dressed quite as a girl--almost as a child. Her plain dark-blue woollen skirt came only just below her ankles, and showed very pretty, small, thoroughbred-looking feet, cased in shabby slippers, which had once been red, and were now no colour at all that can be classified. The loosely-made blouse bodice of her frock, for it could hardly be called a gown, showed a charming figure, rounded, but not yet full, graceful and lissom. An ugly hard leather belt clasped her round little waist, and two fingers of her right hand were thrust in between the belt and the waist as she came swinging slowly along in the direction of a table on which stood a cage containing two canary-birds. Her left hand hung loosely at her side, and held a bunch of green stuff--food for the birds, no doubt.