Our Own Set. Ossip Schubin

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      "Allow me to request," she said, "that for the future in the first place you will not make friends with a common driver and in the second, that you will not drive about Rome in a Botta (a one horse carriage); it is not at all the thing. You have no sense of fitness whatever."

      Zinka, who was both sensitive and spoilt, colored.

      "Let her be, mother, why should she not learn a little Italian and ride in a Botta? said Sterzl, who rubbed his mother the wrong way from morning till night. Sempaly took prompt advantage of the situation to whisper to Zinka:

      "I cannot promise to be as good company as your Botta driver, but if you will allow me, I will do my best to help you to find the Rome you have lost."

      "Are you sure you know your way about?" asked the girl with frank incivility.

      "I am the laquais de place of the Embassy I assure you," replied Sempaly laughing; "my only serious occupation consists in showing strangers the sights of Rome."

      After this the evening passed gaily; the baroness made a few idiotic speeches but Sempaly forbore to be ironical; he was on his very best behavior, and the baroness was quite taken in by his elaborate reserve. Not so Sterzl, who was himself too painfully alive to her aristocratic airs and pretensions. However, the society of his sister, whom he adored, had put him into the best of humors; he launched forth a few bitter epigrams against the priesthood, and was satirical about the society of Rome, but Zinka stopped him every time with some engaging nonsense, and in listening to her chatter he forgot his bitterness.

      At last he asked her to sing a Moravian popular song; she seated herself at the hotel piano and began. There was something mystical in the low veiled tones of her voice like an echo of the past, as she sang the melancholy, dreamy strains of her native land. Sterzl, who always yawned all through an opera, listened to her singing, his head resting on his hand, in a sort of ecstasy. In Sempaly too, who in spite of his Hungarian name was by birth a Moravian, Zinka's simple melody roused the half-choked echoes of his youth, and when she ceased he thanked her with genuine feeling.

      Zinka's was an April weather nature. After bringing the tears into the eyes of her hearers, nay into her own, with her song, she suddenly struck up an air by Lecocq that she had heard Judic sing at Nice. The words, as was perfectly evident to all the party, were Hebrew to the girl, but the baroness was beside herself.

      "Zinka!" she exclaimed in extreme consternation, "you really are incredible--what must these gentlemen think of you!"

      "Do not be in the least uneasy," said the general. But Zinka stopped short; her face was pale and quivering; Sterzl interposed:

      "It is often a little difficult to follow my sister's vagaries," he said turning to Sempaly; then he tenderly stroked her golden head with his large, firm hand, saying: "Do not be unhappy, sweetheart; but you are a little too much of a goose for your age."

      When presently Sempaly had quitted the hotel with the general his first words were: "Tell me, how is it that with such a fool of a mother that child has remained so angelically fresh--so Botticelli?"