fore the overture the Duke paid a call on the Duchess; he made a point
of standing behind her and leaving the front seat to Emilio next the
Duchess. He made a few trivial remarks, without sarcasm or bitterness,
and with as polite a manner as if he were visiting a stranger.

But in spite of his efforts to seem amiable and natural, the Prince
could not control his expression, which was deeply anxious. Bystanders
would have ascribed such a change in his usually placid features to
jealousy. The Duchess no doubt shared Emilio's feelings; she looked
gloomy and was evidently depressed. The Duke, uncomfortable enough
between two sulky people, took advantage of the French doctor's entrance
to slip away.

"Monsieur," said Cataneo to his physician before dropping the curtain
over the entrance to the box, "you will hear to-night a grand musical
poem, not easy of comprehension at a first hearing. But in leaving you
with the Duchess I know that you can have no more competent interpreter,
for she is my pupil."

The doctor, like the Duke, was struck by the expression stamped on the
faces of the lovers, a look of pining despair.

"Then does an Italian opera need a guide to it?" he asked Massimilla,
with a smile.

Recalled by this question to her duties as mistress of the box, the
Duchess tried to chase away the clouds that darkened her brow, and
replied, with eager haste, to open a conversation in which she might
vent her irritation:--

"This is not so much an opera, monsieur," said she, "as an oratorio--a
work which is in fact not unlike a most magnificent edifice, and I shall
with pleasure be your guide. Believe me, it will not be too much to give
all your mind to our great Rossini, for you need to be at once a poet
and a musician to appreciate the whole bearing of such a work.

"You belong to a race whose language and genius are too practical for
it to enter into music without an effort; but France is too intellectual
not to learn to love it and cultivate it, and to succeed in that as in
everything else. Also, it must be acknowledged that music, as created
by Lulli, Rameau, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Cimarosa, Paisiello, and
Rossini, and as it will be carried on by the great geniuses of the
future, is a new art, unknown to former generations; they had indeed no
such variety of instruments on which the flowers of melody now blossom
as on some rich soil.

"So novel an art demands study in the public, study of a kind that
may d