reat future for the Signorina. She will be a great actress and singer.
The death of this child is everything to us; it was just what was
required to give her power, to stir the depths of her nature. _Mio
caro_," he continued caressingly, putting his hand on Carricchio's arm,
"believe me, _this_ is life, and _this_ is art!"

"He is a cold-blooded old devil," muttered Carricchio savagely, as he
turned away, "with his infernal talk of art. I would not go to Vienna
with him but for the Signorina. I will see her once upon the stage
there. Then the old worn-out Arlecchino will go back into the sunshine,
and die, and go to Mark."

III.

THE Maestro's romantic opera was a success. He was at least so far a
genius that he knew where he was strong and where he was weak.

He reproduced with great exactness the play in the palace gardens, but
he kept the person and character of Mark enshrouded in mystery, allowing
him to appear very seldom, and trusting entirely to the singing of the
principal performers, and especially of the Signorina, to impress the
audience with the idea of his purity and innocence. He surpassed himself
in the intense wistful music of the score; never had he produced such
pathetic airs, such pleading sustained harmonies, such quivering
lingering chords and cadences. At the supreme moment the boy appears,
and, after singing with exquisite melody his hapless yet heroic fate,
offers his bosom to the sacrificial knife. But a god intervenes. Veiled
in cloud and recognised in thunders, a divine and merciful hand is laid
upon the child. Death comes to him as a sleep, and over his dead and
lovely form the anger of heaven is appeased. Incapable as the Maestro
was of feeling much of the pathos and beauty of his own work, still,
with that wonderful instinct, or art, or genius, which supplies the
place of feeling, he produced, amid much that was grotesque and
incongruous, a work of delicate touch and thrilling and entrancing
sound. The little theatre near the Kohl market, where the piece was
first produced, was crowded nightly, and the narrow thoroughfares
through private houses and courtyards, called Durch-haeuser, with which
the extraordinary and otherwise impenetrable maze of building which
formed old Vienna was pierced through and through, were filled with fine
and delicate ladies and gay courtiers seeking admission. So great,
indeed, was the success that an arrangement was made with the conductors
of the Im