"Now, mother, here is a treat for you; you will get all the English papers here, and all the news."
"You forget, Natalie," said her mother, smiling, "that English papers are not of much use to me."
"Ah, well, the foreign papers," she said, quickly. "You see, mother, I want to go along to a chemist's to get some white rose."
"You should not throw it about the railway carriages so much, Natalushka," the unsuspecting mother said, reprovingly. "You are extravagant."
She did not heed.
"Perhaps they will have it in Naples. Wait until I come back, mother; I shall not be long."
But it was not white-rose scent that was in her mind as she went rapidly away and got ready to go out; and it was not in search of any chemist's shop that she made her way to the Via Roma. Why, she had asked herself that morning, as she stood on the balcony, and drank in the sunlight and the sweet air, should she take the poor tired mother with her on this adventure? If there was danger, she would brave it by herself. She walked quickly—perhaps anxious to make the first plunge.
She had no difficulty in finding the Vico Carlo, though it was one of the narrowest and steepest of the small, narrow, and steep lanes leading off the main thoroughfare into the masses of tall and closely-built houses on the side of the hill. But when she looked up and recognized the little plate bearing the name at the corner, she turned a little pale; something, she knew not what, was now so near.
And as she turned into this narrow and squalid little alley, it seemed as if her eyes, through some excitement or other, observed the objects around her with a strange intensity. She could remember each and every one of them afterward—the fruit-sellers bawling, and the sellers of acidulated drinks out-roaring them; the shoemakers already at work at their open stalls; mules laden with vegetables; a negro monk, with his black woolly head above the brown hood; a venerable letter-writer at a small table, spectacles on nose and pen in hand, with two women whispering to him what he was to write for them. She made her way up the steep lane, through the busy, motley, malodorous crowd, until she reached the corner pointed out to her by Calabressa.
But he had not told her which way to turn, and for a second or two she stood in the middle of the crossing, uncertain and bewildered. A brawny-looking fellow, apparently a