Those words might have been an enigma to an absolutely humble and innocent young man: "_No, it was not Pier-Angelo; it was he!_" What a mysterious reply, or what extraordinary abstraction! But to Michel it was not abstraction: that _he_ did not relate to Pier-Angelo, but to himself. To the princess, therefore, he was a person whom it was not necessary to call by name, and she spoke of him in that concise and emphatic way to a man who was in love with her. That inexplicable sentence, and the reticence which had preceded it, her refusal to admit that she loved the marquis, that _solemn moment of her life_ to which she had referred, that terrible shock which she said that she had had during the evening, that important confidential communication which she was to make the next day--did all of these relate to Michel? When he remembered the inexplicable glance she had bestowed upon him when she saw him for the first time before the opening of the ball, he was tempted to give way to the most insane presumptions. It is true that, while she was talking with the marquis, there had been a moment when her dreamy eyes had shone with no less extraordinary brilliancy; but it seemed to Michel that their expression was not the same as when they had looked into his. Glance for glance, he preferred the one that had fallen to him. Who could describe the marvellous and gorgeous romances which that rash youth's brain developed during the next quarter of an hour? They were all built upon the same foundation, the unheard-of genius of a young artist who was ignorant of his own powers, and who had suddenly revealed them in a brilliant and extensive piece of decorative work. The lovely princess for whom that masterly work was undertaken had come often, by stealth, to observe its progress, and during the week that the artist had spent in the enchanted palace, taking his siesta and eating at certain hours, in certain mysterious rooms, this invisible fairy had come to gaze upon him, sometimes from behind a curtain, sometimes from a rose-window in the wall. She had been smitten with love for his person or with admiration for his talents--at any rate with an infatuation of some sort for him; and that sentiment was so intense that she could not summon the necessary self-possession to manifest it by words. Her glance had revealed everything to him in spite of herself; and how should he, trembling and bewildered as he was, find a way to tell her that he had understood her? He had reached that point when the Marquis della Serra, the princess's adorer, suddenly reappeared before him and surprised him holding in his hands the fan the princess had left on the divan, and gazing at it without seeing it.