an not do it when I ask it?" she exclaimed.

"Oh Mildred, do not ask me; I can not, can not do it," and the face of
the affrighted musician told plainer than words of the turmoil raging
in his soul.

"You made me believe that I was the only one you loved," passionately
she cried; "the only one; that your happiness was incomplete without
me. You led me into the region of light only to make the darkness
greater when I descended to earth again. I ask you to do a simple
thing and you refuse; you refuse because another has commanded you."

"Mildred, Mildred; if you love me do not speak thus!"

And she, with imagination greater than reasoning power, at once saw a
Tuscan beauty and Diotti mutually pledging their love with their
lives.

"Go," she said, pointing to the door, "go to the one who owns you,
body and soul; then say that a foolish woman threw her heart at your
feet and that you scorned it!" She sank to the sofa.

He went toward the door, and in a voice that sounded like the echo of
despair, protested: "Mildred, I love you; love you a thousand times
more than I do my life. If I should destroy the string, as you ask,
love and hope would leave me forevermore. Death would not be robbed of
its terror!" and with bowed head he went forth into the twilight.

She ran to the window and watched his retreating figure as he
vanished. "Uncle Sanders was right; he loves another woman, and that
string binds them together. He belongs to her!" Long and silently she
stood by the window, gazing at the shadowing curtain of the coming
night. At last her face softened. "Perhaps he does not love her now,
but fears her vengeance. No, no; he is not a coward! I should have
approached him differently; he is proud, and maybe he resented my
imperative manner," and a thousand reasons why he should or should not
have removed that string flashed through her mind.

"I will go early to the concert to-night and see him before he plays.
Uncle Sanders said he did not touch that string when he played. Of
course he will play on it for me, even if he will not cut it off, and
then if he says he loves me, and only me, I will believe him. I want
to believe him; I want to believe him," all this in a semi-hysterical
way addressed to the violinist's portrait on the piano.

When she entered her carriage an hour later, telling the coachman to
drive direct to the stage-door of the Academy, she appeared more
fascinating than ever before.

She was sitting i