e emotions his art was raising in
his pupil's bosom while he taught her; could he have imagined how
incessantly, during their lessons, her sense of duty struggled with her
love for music--how completely she was absorbed, one moment by an agony
of doubt and fear, another by an ecstasy of enjoyment and hope--he
would have felt little of that astonishment at her coldness towards
himself which he so warmly expressed at his interview with Julia in the
gardens of the Court. In truth, nothing could be more complete than
Antonina's childish unconsciousness of the feelings with which Vetranio
regarded her. In entering his presence, whatever remnant of her
affections remained unwithered by her fears was solely attracted and
engrossed by the beloved and beautiful lute. In receiving the
instrument, she almost forgot the giver in the triumph of possession;
or, if she thought of him at all, it was to be grateful for having
escaped uninjured from a member of that class, for whom her father's
reiterated admonitions had inspired her with a vague feeling of dread
and distrust, and to determine that, now she had acknowledged his
kindness and departed from his domains, nothing should ever induce her
to risk discovery by her father and peril to herself by ever entering
them again.

Innocent in her isolation, almost infantine in her natural simplicity,
a single enjoyment was sufficient to satisfy all the passions of her
age. Father, mother, lover, and companion; liberties, amusements, and
adornments--they were all summed up for her in that simple lute. The
archness, the liveliness, and the gentleness of her disposition; the
poetry of her nature, and the affection of her heart; the happy bloom
of youth, which seclusion could not all wither nor distorted precept
taint, were now entirely nourished, expanded, and freshened--such is
the creative power of human emotion--by that inestimable possession.
She could speak to it, smile on it, caress it, and believe, in the
ecstasy of her delight, in the carelessness of her self-delusion, that
it sympathised with her joy. During her long solitudes, when she was
silently watched in her father's absence by the brooding, melancholy
stranger whom he had set over her, it became a companion dearer than
the flower-garden, dearer even that the plains and mountains which
formed her favourite view. When her father returned, and she was led
forth to sit in a dark place among strange, silent people, and to
li