As Minna Wroe opened her eyes that morning in the furnished house in the Via Clementina, she could hardly realise even now that she was actually at Rome, and within half-an-hour\'s walk of dear Colin.

Yes, that was mainly how the Eternal City, the capital of art, the centre of Christendom, the great museum of all the ages, envisaged itself as of course to the frank barbarism of poor wee Minna\'s simple little bosom. Some of us, when we go to Rome, see in it chiefly a vast historical memory—the Forum, the Colosseum, the arch of Titus, the ruined Therm?, the Palace of the Caesars. Some of us see in it rather a magnificent panorama of ancient and modern art, the Vatican, St. Peter\'s, the Apollo, the Aphrodite, the great works of Michael Angelo, and Raphael, and the spacious broad-souled Renaissance painters. Some see in it a modern gimcrack Italian metropolis; some, a fashionable English winter residence; some, a picturesque, quaint old-world medi?val city; some, a Babylon doomed before long to a terrible fiery destruction; and some, a spiritual centre of marvellous activity, with branches that ramify out in a thousand directions over the entire civilised and barbarous world. But Minna Wroe thought of that wonderful composite heterogeneous Rome for the most part merely as the present home and actual arena of Colin Churchill, sculptor, at Number 84 in the Via Colonna.

It had been a grand piece of luck for Minna, the chance that brought her the opportunity of taking that long-looked-for, and much desired journey. To be sure, she had been very happy in her own way down in the pretty little rural Surrey village. Mr. O\'Donovan was the kindest and most fatherly old clergyman that ever lived; and though he did bother her just a little now and then with teaching in the Sunday school and conducting the Dorcas society, and taking charge of the Mothers\' meeting, still he was so good and gentle and sympathetic to her at all times, that Minna could easily have forgiven him for twice as much professional zeal as he ever himself displayed in actual reality. Yet for all that, though the place was so pretty, and the work so light, and the four little girls on the whole such nice pleasant well-behaved little mortals, Minna certainly did miss Colin very terribly. Some employers would doubtless have said to themselves when they saw the governess moping and melancholy in spite of all the comfort that was provided for her: \'Well, what more on earth that girl can possibly be wanting really passes my poor finite comprehension.\' But Mr. O\'Donovan knew better. He was one of those people who habitually and instinctively put themselves in the place of others; and when on Sunday mornings after the letter with the twenty-five centesimi stamp had arrived at the rectory, he saw poor Minna moving about the house before church, looking just a trifle tearful, he said to himself with a shake of his dear kindly old broken-nosed head: \'Ah well, ah well; young people will be young people; and I\'ve often noticed that however comfortable a girl of twenty-two may be in all externals, why, God bless my soul, if she\'s got a lover five hundred miles away, she can\'t help crying a bit about him every now and then—and very natural!\' Minna gratefully observed too, that on all such occasions Mr. O\'Donovan treated her with more than his usual consideration, and seemed to understand exactly what it was that made her rather sharper than her wont with the small feelings of the four little ones.

And Mr. O\'Donovan never forgot his promise to Minna to look out for a family who were going to Rome and who wanted an English governess. \'But, bless my soul,\' he thought to himself, \'who on earth would ever have believed beforehand what a precious difficult thing it is to find a person who fulfils at once both the conditions? People going to Rome, dozens of \'em; people wanting a governess, dozens of \'em also; but people going to Rome and wanting a governess, I regret to say, not a soul to be heard of. Sounds just like a Senate House problem, when I was a young fellow at Cambridge: If out of x A\'s there are y B\'s and z C\'s, what are the chances that any B is also a C?

Answer, precious little.\' Indeed, the good old parson even went the length of putting an advertisement into the Guardian twice a year, without saying a word about it to Minna: \'A Clergyman (beneficed) wishes to recommend highly qualified Young Lady as English nursery Governess to a Family wintering at Rome.\' But he never got a single answer. \'Dear, dear,\' the kind old gentleman muttered to himself, on each such occasion when the post passed by day after day without bringing him a single one of the expected applications, \'that\'s always the way, unfortunately. Advertise that you want a governess, and you have fifty poor young girls answering at once, wasting a penny stamp a-piece, and waiting eagerly to know whether you\'ll be kindly pleased to engage \'em. Advertise that you want a place as governess, and never a soul will take a moment\'s notice of you. Supply and demand, I believe they call it in the newspapers; supply and demand; but in a Christian country one might have imagined they\'d have got something more charitable to give us by this time than the bare gospel of Political Economy. When I was young, we didn\'t understand Political Economy; and Mr. Malthus, who wrote about it, used to be considered little better than a heathen. Still, I\'ve done my duty, as far as I\'ve been able; that\'s one comfort. And if I can\'t succeed in getting a place for George Wroe\'s daughter to go and join this wonderful clever lover of hers at Rome (confound the fellow, he\'s making a pot of money I see by the papers; why the dickens doesn\'t he send over and fetch her?)—well anyhow, dear Lucy\'s children are getting the benefit of her attention, meanwhile, and what on earth I should do without her now, I\'m sure I haven\'t the slightest conception.\'

At last, however, after one of these regular six-monthly notices the rector happened to come down to breakfast one morning, and found a letter in a strange foreign-looking hand lying beside his porridge on the dining-room table. He turned it over and looked anxiously at the back:—yes, it was just as he hoped and feared; it bore a London post-mark, and had a Byzantine-look-ing coronet embossed upon it in profuse gilding and brilliantly blazoned heraldic colours. The old man\'s heart sank within him. \'Confound it,\' he said to himself, half-angrily, \'I do believe I\'ve gone and done my duty this time with a regular vengeance. This is an answer to the advertisement at last, and it\'s an application from somebody or other to carry off dear little Miss Wroe to Rome as somebody\'s governess. Hang it all, how shall I ever manage, at my age too, to accommodate myself to another young woman! I won\'t open it now. I can\'t open it now. If I open it before prayers and breakfast, and it really turns out to be quite satisfactory, I shall break down over it, I know I shall; and then little Miss Wroe will see I\'ve been crying about it, and refuse to leave us—she\'s a good girl, and if she knew how much I valued her, she\'d refuse to leave us; and so after all she\'d never get to join this sculptor son of young Sam Churchill\'s that she\'s for ever thinking of. I\'ll put it away till after breakfast. Perhaps indeed it mayn\'t be at all the thing for her—which would be very lucky—no, I mean unlucky;—well, there, there, what a set of miserable selfish wretched creatures we are really, whenever it comes to making even a small sacrifice for one another. Con O\'Donovan, my boy, you know perfectly well in your heart of hearts you were half-wishing that that poor girl wasn\'t going at last to join her lover that she\'s so distracted about; and yet after that, you have the impudence to get up in the pulpit every Sunday morning, and preach a sermon about our duty to others to your poor parishioners—perhaps, even out of the fifth chapter of Matthew, you confounded hypocrite! It seems to me there\'s a good deal of truth in that line of Tennyson\'s, though it sounds so cynical:

However we brave it out, we men are a little breed!

Upon my soul, when I come to think of it, I\'m really and truly quite ashamed of myself.\'

Do you ever happen to have noticed that the very men who have the smallest possible leaven of littleness, or meanness, or selfishness, in their own natures are usually the exact ones who most often bitterly reproach themselves for their moral shortcomings in this matter?

When the rector came to open the envelope by-and-by in his own study, he found it contained a letter in French from a Russian countess, then in London, who proposed spending the winter in Italy. \'Madame had seen M. O\'Donovan\'s Advertisement in a journal of his country, and would be glad to learn from Monsieur some particulars about the young lady whom he desired to recommend to families. Madame required a governess for one little girl, and proposed a salary of 2,500 francs.\' The old man\'s eyes brightened at the idea of so large an offer—one hundred pounds sterling—and then he laid down the letter again, and cried gently to himself, as old people sometimes do, for a few minutes. After that, he reflected that Georgey Wroe\'s daughter was a very good girl, and deserved any advancement that he could get for her; and Georgey was a fine young fellow himself, and as clever a hand at managing a small smack in a squall off the Chesil as any fisherman, bar none, in all England. God bless his soul, what a run that was they had together, the night the \'Sunderbund\' East Indiaman went to pieces off Deadman\'s Bay, from Seaton Bar right round the Bill to Lulworth! He could mind even now the way the water broke over the gunwale into Georgey\'s face, and how Georgey laughed at the wind, and swore it was a mere breeze, and positively whistled to it. Well, well, he would do what he could for Georgey\'s daughter, and he must look out (with a stifled sigh) for some other good girl to take care of Lucy\'s precious little ones.

So he sat down and wrote off such a glowing account of Minna\'s many virtues to the Russian countess in London—an account mainly derived from his own calm inner belief as to what a perfect woman\'s character ought to be made up of—that the Russian countess wrote back to say she would engage Mdlle. Wroe immediately, without even waiting to see her. Till he got that answer, Mr. O\'Donovan never said a word about the matter to Minna, for fear she might be disappointed; but as soon as it arrived, and he had furtively dried his eyes behind his handkerchief, lest she should see how sorry he was to lose her, he laid the two letters triumphantly down before her, and said, in a voice which seemed as though he were quite as much interested in the event as she was: \'There you see, my dear, I\'ve found somebody at last for you to go to Rome with.\' Minna\'s head reeled and her eyes swam as she read the two letters to herself with some difficulty (for her French was of the strictly school-taught variety); but as soon as she had spelt out the meaning to her own intense satisfaction, she flung her arms round old Mr. O\'Donovan\'s neck, and kissed him twice fervently. Mr. O\'Donovan\'s eyes glistened, and he kissed her in return gently on her forehead. She had grown to be to him almost like a daughter, and he loved her so dearly that it was a hard wrench to part from her. \'And you know, my dear,\' he said to her with fatherly tenderness, \'you won\'t mind my mentioning it to you, I\'m sure, because I need hardly tell you how much interest I take in my old friend Georgey\'s daughter; but I think it\'s just as well the lady\'s a foreigner, and especially a Russian, because they\'re not so particular, I believe, about the conventionalities of society as our English mothers are apt to be; and you\'ll probably get more opportunities of seeing young Churchill when occasion offers than you would have done if you\'d happened to have gone abroad with an English family.\'

When Minna went away from the country rectory, at very short notice, some three weeks later, Mary the housemaid observed, with a little ill-natured smile to the other village gossips, that it wasn\'t before it was time, neither; for the way that that there Miss Wroe, as she called herself, had been carrying on last month or two along of poor old master, and him a clergyman, too, and old enough to know better, but there, what can you expect, for everybody knows what an old gentleman is when a governess or anybody can twist him round her little finger, was that dreadful that really she often wondered whether a respectable girl as was always brought up quite decent and her only a fisherman\'s daughter, too, as master hisself admitted, but them governesses, when they got theirselves a little eddication and took a sitooation, was that stuck-up and ridiculous, not but what she made her always keep her place, for that matter, for she wasn\'t going to be put down by none of your governesses, setting themselves up to be ladies when they wasn\'t no better nor she was, but at any rate it was a precious good thing she was gone now before things hadn\'t gone no further, for if she\'d stayed, why, of course, there wouldn\'t have been nothing left for her to do, as had always lived in proper families, but to go and give notice herself afore she\'d stop in such a sitooation.

And Mrs. Upjohn, the doctor\'s wife, smiled blandly when Mary spoke to her about it, and said in a grave tone of severe moral censure: \'Well, there, Mary, you oughtn\'t to want to meddle with your master\'s business, whatever you may happen to fancy. Not but what Miss Wroe herself certainly did behave in a most imprudent and unladylike manner; and I can\'t deny, of course, that she\'s laid herself open to every word of what you say about her. But then, you know, Mary, she isn\'t a lady; and, after all, what can you expect from such a person?\' To which Mary, having that profound instinctive contempt for her own class which is sometimes begotten among the essentially vulgar by close unconscious introspection, immediately answered: \'Ah, what indeed!\' and went on unrebuked with her ill-natured gossip. So high and watchful is social morality amid the charming Arcadian simplicity of our outlying English country villages.

But poor little Minna, waking up that very morning in the Via Clementina, never heeded their venomous backbiting one bit, and thought only of going to see her dear Colin. What a surprise it would be to him to see her, to be sure; for Minna, fearful that the scheme might fall through before it was really settled, had written not a word to him about it beforehand, and meant to surprise him by dropping in upon him quite unexpectedly at his studio without a single note of warning.

\'Ah, my dear,\' the countess said to her, when Minna, trembling, asked leave to go out and visit her cousin—that dim relationship, so inevitable among country folk from the sam............