“That is it, then,” Ribas would often say; “he diffuses happiness everywhere around him, while he himself has it not! He makes glad and cheerful faces wherever he appears, and his own is the only serious and sad brow. Mankind have made him hopeless, and for himself he no longer believes in happiness!” Ah, how then did the heart of this innocent child tremble, and how she longed to find some means for restoring his belief in happiness. “But why does he not come to those who love him?” asked she. “Why does he decline the thanks of those whose hearts are truly devoted to him? Ah, in our humid eyes and joy-beaming faces he would recognize the truthfulness of our feelings! Why, then, comes he not?” “I will tell you,” said Ribas, with a smile; “he hates women, because the only one he ever loved was false to him, and now his love is changed to ardent hatred of all women!” “I shall therefore never see him!” sighed the girl, hanging her head with the sadness of disappointment. This expectation, this constantly increasing impatience, rendered her inaccessible to any other feeling, any other thought. He of whom she did not know even the name, was sent by Paulo, and therefore had she believed and confided in him from the first. Now had she already forgotten that she had confided in him on Paulo’s account; she believed in him on his own account, and Paulo had retreated into the background. Occasionally also the bloody image of poor Carlo presented itself to her mind, and she secretly reproached herself for having mourned him for so short a time, for having so soon forgotten that faithful, self-sacrificing friend. But even these reproaches were soon silenced when with a throbbing bosom she thought of this new friend, who like a divinity hovered over her at an infinite and unattainable distance, and whose mysteriously active nearness replaced both of those friends she had lost, and for whom she could no longer mourn. HE! “It is now high time!” said Joseph Ribas, one day, as, coming from Natalie, he entered the boudoir of Count Alexis Orloff. “Now, your excellency, the right moment has come! You must show yourself, or this curious child will consume herself with a longing that has changed her blood to fire! She thinks of nothing but you; with open eyes she dreams of you, and without the least suspicion that any one is listening to her, she speaks to you, ah, with what modest tenderness and with what humble devotion! I tell you, your excellency, you are highly blessed. There is no child more innocent, no woman more glowing with love. And she knows it not; no, she has not the least suspicion that she already loves you with enthusiasm, and thirsts for your kisses as the rose for the morning dew! She knows nothing of her love!” “She shall learn something of it!” said Orloff, laughing. “It will be a pleasant task to enlighten this little unknowing one as to her own feelings. And I flatter myself I understand how to do that.”