The little bit of a window, small though it was,
gave the inmate the precious advantage of a pure
and unbroken light; for, looking out over the
river as it did, there was nothing between it
and the heavens.

Here, seated at her bench and busily at
work in shaping the delicate materials of her art
into the expression of some dainty device or
skilful reproduction of mediæval workmanship,
Laura passed the happiest hours of her life;
unless, indeed, those exceptional ones of the
society of Carlo are to be counted as ranking
first in her estimation.

And now this evening, one of the last, as she
hoped, silly mortal! of that short, never-returning
blossom-time of a life which precedes love's
fruit-season—this evening she would celebrate
by a combination of both delights. The two old
men sat down in the front shop for a "chiaccherata"
—a bout of gossip; and Carlo, as she had
intended him to do, followed her into her
workshop and artistic sanctum. She sat down in her
accustomed seat at the narrow work-bench
before the window, and Carlo took the only other
seat in the little room, and placed himself at the
end of the bench, and thus at right angles to her
and the window. Of course they had enough to
talk of. But if Laura had been intent on talk
only, the lamp would hardly have been necessary.
For the moonlight was streaming in at the little
window, and was reflected in a long pathway of
light on the water, extending from the edge of
the shadow cast by the "Ponte alle Grazie"—
the bridge next above the Ponte Vecchio on the
river—till it ended beneath the arches of the old
bridge under their feet. Few quainter and more
characteristic town views could be found than
that commanded by the little window at which
the lovers sat. In front, the queer old bridge of
the Grazie, with its chapels, and little shops on
its massive piers all in deep shadow, and the
Chianti hills in the distance; to the left the
river façade of the Uffizi, with its noble
arches and harmonious Palladian architecture—
that frontage of which Vasari was prouder than
of all his other various art-works, and of
the difficulty of rearing which on the unstable
soil of the river-brink he boasts so much—all this,
too, black in deep shade; then, to the right, the
strangely varied line of the backs of the houses,
which at this part of the river come sheer down
to the water, without any intervening quay or
pathway. These were in the full moonlight; but
the irregularities of the buildings chequered the
light with innumerable variously shaped patches
of shade. The backs of houses always offer a
more suggestive and amusing view, and often a
more picturesque one, than their more uniform
street fronts, got up with a view to respectable
appearance in public. The inhabitants of every
one of them would be far more interesting
objects of observation than they mostly are, if
one could get a peep at their minds and opinions
in an analogous behind-the-scenes point of view.
And it is the same with their dwellings.

CHAPTER III. THE JEWELLER'S SHOP.

LAURA'S lamp was not needed for looking on
this scene, or for conversing with Carlo, as they
sat in the moonlight. But she was never absent
from her work-bench for a few hours without
longing to be back at it. And now she was in a
hurry to look at a piece of workmanship which
she was completing, and which she was anxious
to compare with an engraving she had recollected
while at the Cascine. Laura's piece consisted in
a most ingenious and tasteful combination and
adaptation of several pearls of large size, but of
very irregular shape, in such a manner as to make
their abnormal forms serve instead of marring the
purpose of her design. Most daintily fancied was
the idea she had imagined, and Laura was pleased
with her work, and eager to return to it. Carlo
had not yet seen it, as she had intended to have
shown it him only when finished. But this evening
she could not resist drawing it forth from the
little locked drawer beneath the working-bench;
and so it was presented for the criticism of the
Paris-taught workman in its still unfinished
state.

"Charming!" cried Carlo, genuinely pleased
with the beauty of the gem; "davvero, davvero—
truly, truly, it is exquisite. There is but my
Laura in all Florence this day capable of a design
so deliciously fancied. There is the true sentiment
of the cinque-cento," added he, recurring
to a Florentine artist's constant beau-ideal of art
in all its branches.

"Ah, that is the real praise!" said Laura;
"that is what I have been striving after. And
if I could only hope that I had a ray of the real
light!"

Very absurd, was not it, for a poor jeweller's
prentice daughter to talk in such a strain?
Absurd enough for a girl to meddle with men's
work at all, and quite against all the rules of the
trade! But then, you see, poor Laura was
an enthusiast in her own way; knew all the
glories of the Carrionis, Gaffuris, Torricellis, and
Ginghis, the masters of her own craft in the days
when fine art meant the creation of the beautiful
in any form and in any material; knew especially
the story of Francesco Borghigiani and his
daughter, who at a later day won herself a niche
in Art's Pantheon by her skill in works of the
same class. And what with old Laudadio's
ancient Ponte Vecchio traditions, her own art
readings, her Florentine old-world notions, and
her enthusiastic perception and culture of the
beautiful, the pretty jewelleress had not the
least idea that the professors of her craft had
been pushed in the world's onward movement
from the place of artists into that of artisans.

"What!" she would have cried, "was not old
Niccolo Caparra, the blacksmith, immortalised
by Vasari in the same pages that record Perugino
and Raphael, on account of his beautiful forgings?
For me the artist is he who can feel and
reproduce beauty!"

Quite a fanatica, this pretty little Laura!
Yes; but not by very far so strange a one,