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A Romance of Two Worlds by Marie Corelli
page 8 of 365 (02%)
in any sort of finale. So the days went on; for Colonel Everard and
his wife, those days were full of merriment, sight-seeing, and
enjoyment. For me, though outwardly I appeared to share in the
universal gaiety, they were laden with increasing despair and
wretchedness; for I began to lose hope of ever recovering my once
buoyant health and strength, and, what was even worse, I seemed to
have utterly parted with all working ability. I was young, and up to
within a few months life had stretched brightly before me, with the
prospect of a brilliant career. And now what was I? A wretched
invalid--a burden to myself and to others--a broken spar flung with
other fragments of ship wrecked lives on the great ocean of Time,
there to be whirled away and forgotten. But a rescue was
approaching; a rescue sudden and marvellous, of which, in my wildest
fancies, I had never dreamed.

Staying in the same hotel with us was a young Italian artist,
Raffaello Cellini by name. His pictures were beginning to attract a
great deal of notice, both in Paris and Rome: not only for their
faultless drawing, but for their wonderfully exquisite colouring. So
deep and warm and rich were the hues he transferred to his canvases,
that others of his art, less fortunate in the management of the
palette, declared he must have invented some foreign compound
whereby he was enabled to deepen and brighten his colours for the
time being; but that the effect was only temporary, and that his
pictures, exposed to the air for some eight or ten years, would fade
away rapidly, leaving only the traces of an indistinct blur. Others,
more generous, congratulated him on having discovered the secrets of
the old masters. In short, he was admired, condemned, envied, and
flattered, all in a breath; while he himself, being of a singularly
serene and unruffled disposition, worked away incessantly, caring
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