"And when I should reach the precise explanations, would I have added more beauty to this body full of beauties? As for the soul, I know that it is a secret coffer to which no one--not even she herself--has the key. And what could I do with it, and what could she do with it? So my anxiety is quite futile. What if I took her merely with plausible words, as the bird-call, by its mechanical song, captures the free birds?" They spoke of different things, particularly of the falling leaves, and Hubert skilfully led, under the same stimulus, his revery and the conversation. A Ziem, at the end of the room, cleverly illuminated by hidden lights, a resplendent Italian road-stead, with purple-tinted sails, many colored clouds in the sky, and over all a deep transparency, a sense of great distance, a brilliancy of atmosphere full of the magic of unfailing blue: "Naples, a Naples I have never seen! Ah! that is because I scarcely look towards the gulf, for the Novella is my heaven and my ocean." "Monsieur d'Entragues, why have you such a distracted air?" This brought him back to the truth: he was not Della Preda, she had just pronounced his correct name, and Naples disappeared; after a few minute's absence, he found himself in Paris again, near Madame Sixtine Magne and before a quite good view of Venice. "It is that picture," continued Sixtine. "It pleases me, but do not observe it too closely, for you will be forced to admit that it is mediocre, but charged with some power of illusion for imaginative minds." While cursory words were being exchanged about painters and their paintings, there reawakened in Hubert, without any determinable cause, one of the most significant impressions of his adolescence. Feeling the impossibility of evading it and fearing a fit of abstractions, he repeated it aloud. The word "madonna" uttered by Sixtine furnished the pretext: