. ."
A slight crash disturbed her self-communion, and she hastened to see
what had fallen. It was a small clay figure of "Eros",--a copy of a
statuette found in the ruins of Pompeii. The nail supporting its
bracket had given way. Angela had been rather fond of this little
work of art, and as she knelt to pick up the fragments she was more
vexed at the accident than she cared to own. She looked wistfully at
the pretty moulded broken limbs of the little god as she put them
all in a heap together.
"What a pity!" she murmured, "I am not at all superstitious, yet I
wish anything in the room had come to grief rather than this! It is
not a good omen!"
She moved across the floor again and stood for a moment inert, one
hand resting lightly on the amber silk draperies which veiled her
picture.
"There was no truth at all in that rumour about Florian's
'Phillida';--'Pon-Pon,' as they call her," she thought, "She serves
as a model to half the artists in Rome. Unfortunate creature. She is
one of the most depraved and reckless of her class, so I hear--and
Florian is far too refined and fastidious to even recognise such a
woman, outside his studio. The Marquis Fontenelle only wished to
defend himself by trying to include another man in the charge of
libertinage, when he himself was meditating the most perfidious
designs on Sylvie.
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