"Very well," said Mila; "one day I told her that there was a time when we were very poor in Rome. I was only five or six years old then, and as we had almost nothing to eat, I used sometimes to tell my brother Michel that I was not hungry, so that he would eat my share. But Michel, suspecting my motive, began to say that he was not hungry either; so that we often kept our bread over night, neither of us being willing to admit that we longed to eat it. And the result of that performance was that we made ourselves more unhappy than we really were. I told the princess this laughingly; suddenly she burst into tears and pressed me to her heart, saying: 'Poor children! poor dear children!'--Tell me, signor, if that shows the cold heart and dull mind that people say she has?" The Piccinino took Mila's arm in his and walked about the garden with her, leading her on to talk of the princess. His imagination was engrossed by that woman who had made so deep an impression on him, and he entirely forgot that Mila had occupied his thoughts and disturbed his senses during a part of the day. Honest Mila, still convinced that she was talking to a sincere friend, abandoned herself to the pleasure of praising the woman whom she loved with enthusiasm, and _forgot that she was forgetting herself_, as she expressed it, after walking about for an hour under the magnificent trees in the garden at Nicolosi. The Piccinino had an impressionable brain and a fickle humor. His whole life was a constant alternation of meditation and curiosity. The simple and graceful conversation of Mila, her kindly thoughts, the generous outflow of her affections, and an indefinable touch of grandeur of soul, courage, and cheeriness of temperament, which she inherited from her father and uncle, gradually fascinated the brigand. New horizons opened before him, as if he were passing from the contemplation of a painful and fatiguing drama to that of a placid and lightsome idyll. He was too intelligent not to understand everything, even those things which were most opposed to his instincts and habits. He had devoured Byron's poems. In his dreams he had raised himself to the level of Don Juan and Lara; but he had read Petrarch too, and knew him by heart; indeed he had smiled instead of yawning, as he murmured to himself the _concetti_ of _Aminta_ and the _Pastor Fido_. He felt soothed by his frank converse with little Mila, even more than he ordinarily was when he resorted to that sentimental nonsense to allay the tempests of his passions. But at last the sun began to sink. Mila thought of Magnani, and asked leave to go. "Very well, _addio_, my sweet Mila," said the Piccinino; "but as we walk back to the garden gate I propose to do for you in all seriousness what I have never done for any woman, except from some selfish motive or in mockery." "What is that, monsignor?" queried Mila, in amazement.