obtained; but
at times it frightened her.

"I hate all this," she would cry sometimes, starting away from the
harpsichord; "they are dead and cold, and I sing!"

"Sing! _mia cara!_" the old man would say, with, for him, a soft and
kindly tone; "you cannot help but sing: and when did love and sorrow
feel so near and real to you as when, just now, you sang that phrase in
F minor?"

"It is wicked!" said the girl; but she sang over again, to the perfect
satisfaction of her master, the phrase in F minor.

"It is true," she said, after a pause. "I knew not how to love--I knew
not what love was till I learned to sing from you. Every day I learn
more what love is; I feel every hour more able to love--I love you more
and more for teaching me the art of love."

"Ah, _mia cara_," said the Maestro, "that was not difficult! You were
born with that gift. But it is strange to me, I confess it, how
pathetically you sing. It is not in the music--at any rate, not in my
music. It is beyond my art and even strange to it, but it touches even
me."

And the old man shrugged his shoulders with an odd gesture, in which
something like self-contempt struggled with an unaccustomed emotion.

The girl had turned half round, and was looking at him with her bright,
yet wistful eyes.

"Never mind, Maestro," she said; "I shall love you always for your
music, in spite of your contempt of love, and your miserable, cold----"

And she gave a little shudder. She was forming, indeed, a passionate
regard for the old man, solely for the sake of his art.

It was not by any means the first time that such an event had occurred,
for unselfish love is much more common than cynical mankind believes.

IV.

THE Prince soon grew tired of Wertheim. Apart from other reasons, of
which perhaps we may learn something hereafter, he felt lost without the
accustomed _entourage_ which he had attracted to Joyeuse. The death of
Mark had made a profound impression upon his delicately strung
temperament. It disturbed the lofty serenity of his life, it shocked his
taste, it was bad art. That such a thing could have happened to him in
the very citadel and arcanum of his carefully designed existence--and
should have happened, too, as the result of his own individual purpose
and action--arrested him as with an archangel's sword; showed him
forcibly that his delicately woven mail was deficient in some important,
but as yet unperceived, point; that his fancifully c