“We lived almost always in the city, so that we had not any garden, but we had pots of flowers in the windows, and I used to tend them.  Sometimes, when my father went into the woods and the fields, he would take me, and then I was happy; no bird could have been happier.  I would weave garlands of flowers, singing my rhymes about colors, and he taught me how to arrange them to make every blossom beautiful in its place.

“When he sat writing at his table he called me his mouse, and if I kept still I had cheese for my dinner with the bread and fruit.  But when I forgot and made a noise he would say that the mouse must be caught in a trap, and he would take me in his arms and call Maddalena to carry me away.  And sometimes he went out alone, or shut himself in his own room for days and days.  Once he came out in the twilight and found me asleep with my head on his threshold.  After that he said that I must have work to do while he did his work, and he would have Maddalena teach me the use of the needle.  He dyed the silks for me himself in beautiful colors, and when I had done my task he would teach me to read in the big books and the small, and to draw pictures of what I read.  Here is one of the very books I used to read with him.”

Alan would have thought what he saw was impossible if anything had seemed unbelievable in this elfin girl.  She laid open upon the table a finely illuminated copy, in Greek, of Aesop’s Fables, written on vellum in a precise beautiful hand.

“He himself wrote books for me—­not many, for he said there were books enough in the world.  One was on the nature of herbs, and another was about the stars and their houses in the heavens.  But they were lost, those books.  Father Stephen brought me others, but they are not the same; my father wrote those only for me.”  “Had your father no friends?” Alan asked, with a great compassion for the lonely man bending his genius to make a world for his motherless baby.

“Not many, and none here except Father Stephen, who knew my mother when she was a child, in Ravenna.  People came sometimes, but they were not friends; their eyes were cold and their voices hard.  Since my father went away two old friends of his have been here with Father Stephen, but they came only once.  They were not of this people; they came from Byzantium.”

“And you have lived here always?”

The maiden laughed, a merry laughter like the lilt of a woodlark.  “Oh, no--o!  Father Stephen has taken me to many places—­to Venice once, and to Rome, and when I was little we lived in Cordova.  That is how I learned to speak in different languages.  I learned a new one every year for four years.  But for three years I have stayed in Goslar, and Father Stephen says that no one must know I am here.  That is queer, is it not, to live in a city where not even the people in the next house know that you are alive?  Perhaps some day I shall go away, and live as others do.  I wonder very much what it will be like.”