her
jumped right up from his chair, shouting "Italia!" and he caught his wig
off his head, and threw it into the fire, and rushed out into the street
quite bald, and people thought him mad.

"It was the beginning of all our misfortunes! My father was taken and
locked up in a place as a tipsy man. That he has never forgiven the
English for! It has made me and my mother miserable ever since. My mother
is sure it is all since that night. Do you know, I remember, though I was
so young, that I felt the music--oh! like a devil in my bosom? Perhaps it
was, and it passed out of me into him. Do you think it was?"

Wilfrid answered: "Well, no! I shouldn't think you had anything to do
with the devil." Indeed, he was beginning to think her one of the
smallest of frocked female essences.

"I lost my piano through it," she went on. "I could not practise. I was
the most miserable creature in all the world till I fell in love with my
harp. My father would not play to get money. He sat in his chair, and
only spoke to ask about meal-time, and we had no money for food, except
by selling everything we had. Then my piano went. So then I said to my
mother, I will advertize to give lessons, as other people do, and make
money for us all, myself. So we paid money for a brass-plate, and our
landlady's kind son put it up on the door for nothing, and we waited for
pupils to come. I used to pray to the Virgin that she would blessedly
send me pupils, for my poor mother's complaints were so shrill and out of
tune it's impossible to tell you what I suffered. But by-and-by my father
saw the brass-plate. He fell into one of his dreadful passions. We had to
buy him another wig. His passions were so expensive: my mother used to
say, "There goes our poor dinner out of the window!" But, well! he went
to get employment now. He can, always, when he pleases; for such a touch
on the violin as my father has, you never heard. You feel yourself from
top to toe, when my father plays. I feel as if I breathed music like air.
One day came news from Italy, all in the newspaper, of my father's
friends and old companions shot and murdered by the Austrians. He read it
in the evening, after we had a quiet day. I thought he did not mind it
much, for he read it out to us quite quietly; and then he made me sit on
his knee and read it out. I cried with rage, and he called to me,
'Sandra! Peace!' and began walking up and down the room, while my mother
got the bread and cheese