coherent words gained some order and separated
into question and answer. When Anna learned that the musician had
accompanied her sister, she wished to see him, and when he entered, held
out both hands, exclaiming:

"Meister, Meister, in what a condition you find me again! Henrica, this
is the best of men; the only unselfish friend I have found on earth."

The succeeding hours were full of sorrowful agitation.

Belotti and the old Italian woman often undertook to speak for the
invalid, and gradually the image of a basely-destroyed life, that had
been worthy of a better fate, appeared before Henrica and Wilhelm. Fear,
anxiety and torturing doubt had from the first saddened Anna's existence
with the unprincipled adventurer and gambler, who had succeeded in
beguiling her young, experienced heart. A short period of intoxication
was followed by an unexampled awakening. She was clasping her first
child to her breast, when the unprecedented outrage occurred--Don Luis
demanded that she should move with him into the house of a notorious
Marchesa, in whose ill-famed gambling-rooms he had spent his evenings
and nights for months. She indignantly refused, but he coldly and
threateningly persisted in having his will. Then the Hoogstraten blood
asserted itself, and without a word of farewell she fled with her
child to Lugano. There the boy was received by his mother's former
waiting-maid, while she herself went to Rome, not as an adventuress, but
with a fixed, praiseworthy object in view. She intended to fully perfect
her musical talents in the new schools of Palestrina and Nanini, and
thus obtain the ability, by means of her art, to support her child
independently of his father and hers. She risked much, but very definite
hopes hovered before her eyes, for a distinguished prelate and lover of
music, to whom she had letters of introduction from Brussels, and who
knew her voice, had promised that after her return from her musical
studies he would give her the place of singing-mistress to a young girl
of noble birth, who had been educated in a convent at Milan. She was
under his guardianship, and the worthy man took care to provide Anna,
before her departure, with letters to his friends in the eternal city.

Her hasty flight from Rome had been caused by the news, that Don Luis
had found and abducted his son. She could not lose her child, and when
she did not find the boy in Milan, followed and at last discovered him
in Naples. There