"The paraphrase of the original is yours, Signorina, words and music both. Am I not right? Your silence answers 'Yes.' Will you pardon me if I say that, though there can be no doubt of the new beauty you have given to the old song, I think that the moral of the old was the sounder one, the truer to human life. We do not go on to the last duped by an allusion. If enamoured by the shadow on the waters, still we do look around us and discover the image it reflects." Isaura shook her head gently, but made no answer. On the table before her there were a few myrtle-sprigs and one or two buds from the last winter rose, which she had been arranging into a simple nosegay; she took up these, and abstractedly began to pluck and scatter the rose-leaves. "Despise the coming May flowers if you will, they will soon be so plentiful," said Graham; "but do not cast away the few blossoms which winter has so kindly spared, and which even summer will not give again;" and placing his hand on the winter buds, it touched hers,--lightly, indeed, but she felt the touch, shrank from it, coloured, and rose from her seat. "The sun has left this side of the garden, the east wind is rising, and you must find it chilly here," she said, in an altered tone; "will you not come into the house?" "It is not the air that I feel chilly," said Graham, with a half-smile; "I almost fear that my prosaic admonitions have displeased you." "They were not prosaic; and they were kind and very wise," she added, with her exquisite laugh,--laugh so wonderfully sweet and musical. She now had gained the entrance of the arbour; Graham joined her, and they walked towards the house. He asked her if she had seen much of the Savarins since they had met. "Once or twice we have been there of an evening." "And encountered, no doubt, the illustrious young minstrel who despises Tasso and Corneille?" "M. Rameau? Oh, yes; he is constantly at the Savarins. Do not be severe on him. He is unhappy, he is struggling, he is soured. An artist has thorns in his path which lookers-on do not heed." "All people have thorns in their path, and I have no great respect for those who want lookers-on to heed them whenever they are scratched. But M. Rameau seems to me one of those writers very common nowadays, in France and even in England; writers who have never read anything worth studying, and are, of course, presumptuous in proportion to their ignorance. I should not have thought an artist like yourself could have recognized an artist in a M. Rameau who despises Tasso without knowing Italian." Graham spoke bitterly; he was once more jealous. "Are you not an artist yourself? Are you not a writer? M. Savarin told me you were a distinguished man of letters."