"Jupiter shines on our undertaking. I like him better than Venus, who runs after the sun and needs a rosy flooring for her feet." "Which is Jupiter?" asked Lilly standing still. He eagerly showed her the lord of the heavens and five or six constellations. Lilly clapped her hands like a pleased child. "Now I'll always feel at home up there when I'm alone evenings and look out of the window." She refrained from saying more of what was in her mind. While he waited in front of the door, she ran upstairs, turned off the light, put the key in her pocket, and hastily told Adele she would take supper out that evening. She lingered for nothing else and came hurrying down again. Outside the apartment door she reeled with joy and clung to the post and sobbed. But by the time she reached the street her bearing had become quite proper. "If you are willing to entrust yourself to my guidance," he said, "I know a little corner no one would dream of finding us in. It's practically in Italy." She drew a deep breath. "If only he wouldn't speak so much of Italy," she thought, though for nothing in the world would she have gone elsewhere than to his Italian restaurant. They walked along the canal for about five minutes talking nonsense. The medley of lights of the Potsdamer Brücke was quite near when he paused in front of a narrow, dimly lighted shop window, where about two dozen wine bottles wreathed with green cotton vines grew like asparagus out of sand. "Here Signor Battistini serves a Chianti, than which none better is to be had in Florence," he explained. They entered the shop and crossed a small anteroom, in which the proprietor, black as the ace of spades, was pasting labels behind the bar. "_Sera, padrone_," Lilly's friend greeted him. From the anteroom they passed into a rather long, hall-like room filled with simple tables and chairs. The only decoration consisted of crisscrossed garlands of shiny green paper bits, evidently ambitious of being considered vine leaves, which twined about the bare gas brackets and fell over hooks in the walls. To inform the guests of the occasion for this luxuriant display, a placard hung from the centre wishing them on this March evening a "Happy New Year." "What do you say to this fairy garden?" asked Lilly's friend, while the waiter, black as his master, with an improbable pair of fiery wheels in his face, beseechingly held out his hands for her cloak. At the other tables sat young fellows with thick hair, who rolled long, thread-like cigarettes between their teeth and nearly thrust the knuckles of their clenched fists in one another's eyes while spouting Italian with fascinating rapidity. "Marble cutters," Dr. Rennschmidt explained in a low voice. "Our great sculptors employ them as assistants. They earn a great deal of money, and as soon as they have saved enough they return to Italy to establish a household."