"Miss Leslie."
"Miss Leslie! What a pretty name! Why, it is more Italian than English, I think. Miss Leslie is staying at the hotel."
The prince drew himself up, and with the same fixed regard of respectful, almost reverential, admiration, said:
"I shall have the honor of waiting upon Miss Leslie to-morrow—if she permits."
A servant who had been holding the horse came up, and as the prince mounted, the princess drew near and bent over Margaret.
"Mind! We are to be friends, you and I! I shall come with Ferdinand to-morrow!" then, laying her hand upon the horse's neck, she tripped off beside her brother.
Margaret sat and looked at the view with eyes that saw nothing. She had come to Florence for solitude and seclusion, and already that solitude was threatened. What should she do? The girl was so lovable that Margaret's tender heart already felt drawn toward her. All the more should she guard against the possibility of an intimacy between her—nameless and under a cloud of shame—and these high-born Italians.
With a sigh she began to put her easel together, thinking that she must leave Florence in the morning, when she saw a newspaper lying on the ground.
It was folded up and had evidently fallen from the pocket of the prince.
Half mechanically she opened it and found that it was an English newspaper of some weeks back. Still mechanically she let her eyes wander over the columns, when suddenly she saw amongst the provincial news an account of her own death off the rocks at Appleford.