om such fragrant vapors as fill the brain with
dreams," replied Capraja.

On being recalled, la Tinti appeared alone. She was received with a
storm of applause; a thousand kisses were blown to her from finger-tips;
she was pelted with roses, and a wreath was made of the flowers snatched
from the ladies' caps, almost all sent out from Paris.

The _cavatina_ was encored.

"How eagerly Capraja, with his passion for embellishments, must have
looked forward to this air, which derives all its value from execution,"
remarked Massimilla. "Here Rossini has, so to speak, given the
reins over to the singer's fancy. Her _cadenzas_ and her feeling
are everything. With a poor voice or inferior execution, it would be
nothing--the throat is responsible for the effects of this _aria_.

"The singer has to express the most intense anguish,--that of a woman
who sees her lover dying before her very eyes. La Tinti makes the house
ring with her highest notes; and Rossini, to leave pure singing free to
do its utmost, has written it in the simplest, clearest style. Then,
as a crowning effort, he has composed those heartrending musical cries:
_Tormenti! Affanni! Smanie!_ What grief, what anguish, in those runs.
And la Tinti, you see, has quite carried the house off its feet."

The Frenchman, bewildered by this adoring admiration throughout a vast
theatre for the source of its delight, here had a glimpse of genuine
Italian nature. But neither the Duchess nor the two young men paid any
attention to the ovation. Clarina began again.

The Duchess feared that she was seeing her Emilio for the last time. As
to the Prince: in the presence of the Duchess, the sovereign divinity
who lifted him to the skies, he had forgotten where he was, he no longer
heard the voice of the woman who had initiated him into the mysteries of
earthly pleasure, for deep dejection made his ears tingle with a chorus
of plaintive voices, half-drowned in a rushing noise as of pouring rain.

Vendramin saw himself in an ancient Venetian costume, looking on at the
ceremony of the _Bucentaur_. The Frenchman, who plainly discerned
that some strange and painful mystery stood between the Prince and the
Duchess, was racking his brain with shrewd conjecture to discover what
it could be.

The scene had changed. In front of a fine picture, representing
the Desert and the Red Sea, the Egyptians and Hebrews marched and
countermarched without any effect on the feelings of the four pers