who had sought Gombert,
his famous Brussels companion in art, and was just taking him to a
rehearsal of the Convivium musicum. At this meeting the leader of the
boy choir, in spite of his pleasure at seeing his valued countryman and
companion in art, showed far less patience than before, for, after
the first greeting, he at once asked Feys what he thought of his pupil
Barbara. The answer was so favourable that Appenzelder eagerly accepted
the invitation to attend the rehearsal also. So the four fellow-artists
crossed the Haidplatz together, and Maestro Gombert was obliged to
remind his colleague of the boy choir that people who occupied the
conductor's desk forgot to run on a wager.

Wolf's legs were by no means so long as those of the tall, broad
musician, yet, in his joyous excitement, it was an easy matter to keep
pace with him. In the happy consciousness of meriting the gratitude
of the woman whom he loved, he gazed toward the New Scales, the large
building beneath whose roof she whose image filled his heart and mind
must already have found shelter.

Did she see him coming? Did she suspect who his companions were, and
what awaited her through them?

Yet, sharply as he watched for her, he could discover no sign of her
fair head behind any of the windows.

Yet Barbara, from the little room where the singers laid aside their
cloaks and wraps, had seen Wolf, with her singing master Feys and two
other gentlemen, coming toward the New Scales, and correctly guessed the
names of the slender, shorter stranger in the sable-trimmed mantle and
the big, broad-shouldered, bearded one who accompanied her friend. Wolf
had described them both, and a presentiment told her that something
great awaited her through them.

Gombert was the composer of the bird-song, and, as she remembered how
the refrain of this composition had affected Wolf the day before, she
heard the door close behind the group.

Then the desire to please, which had never left her since she earned the
first applause, seized upon her more fiercely than ever.

Of what consequence were the listeners before whom she had hitherto
sung compared with those whose footsteps were now echoing on the lowest
stairs? And, half animated by an overpowering secret impulse, she sang
the refrain "Car la saison est bonne" aloud while passing the stairs on
her way into the dancing hall, where the rehearsal was to take place.

What an artless delight in the fairest, most pleasing