“Stop!  I won’t have the lace doubled, on second thoughts.  I’ll have it single, and running all round the dress in curves—­so.  Well, and who is this friend of yours employed in the studio?  A fourth sculptor?”

“No, no; the strangest, simplest little creature—­”

Just then a faint tap was audible at the door of the room.

Brigida laid her finger on her lips, and called impatiently to the person outside to come in.

The door opened gently, and a young girl, poorly but very neatly dressed, entered the room.  She was rather thin and under the average height; but her head and figure were in perfect proportion.  Her hair was of that gorgeous auburn color, her eyes of that deep violet-blue, which the portraits of Giorgione and Titian have made famous as the type of Venetian beauty.  Her features possessed the definiteness and regularity, the “good modeling” (to use an artist’s term), which is the rarest of all womanly charms, in Italy as elsewhere.  The one serious defect of her face was its paleness.  Her cheeks, wanting nothing in form, wanted everything in color.  That look of health, which is the essential crowning-point of beauty, was the one attraction which her face did not possess.

She came into the room with a sad and weary expression in her eyes, which changed, however, the moment she observed the magnificently-dressed French forewoman, into a look of astonishment, and almost of awe.  Her manner became shy and embarrassed; and after an instant of hesitation, she turned back silently to the door.

“Stop, stop, Nanina,” said Brigida, in Italian.  “Don’t be afraid of that lady.  She is our new forewoman; and she has it in her power to do all sorts of kind things for you.  Look up, and tell us what you want You were sixteen last birthday, Nanina, and you behave like a baby of two years old!”

“I only came to know if there was any work for me to-day,” said the girl, in a very sweet voice, that trembled a little as she tried to face the fashionable French forewoman again.

“No work, child, that is easy enough for you to do,” said Brigida.  “Are you going to the studio to-day?”

Some of the color that Nanina’s cheeks wanted began to steal over them as she answered “Yes.”

“Don’t forget my message, darling.  And if Master Luca Lomi asks where I live, answer that you are ready to deliver a letter to me; but that you are forbidden to enter into any particulars at first about who I am, or where I live.”

“Why am I forbidden?” inquired Nanina, innocently.

“Don’t ask questions, baby!  Do as you are told.  Bring me back a nice note or message to-morrow from the studio, and I will intercede with this lady to get you some work.  You are a foolish child to want it, when you might make more money here and at Florence, by sitting to painters and sculptors; though what they can see to paint or model in you I never could understand.”