er how to vary the quality of her tone by movements of
the mouth, and to do this she had to watch his lips and he was obliged
to look at hers, which is sometimes a dangerous exercise for young
people, even at a first meeting. For acquaintance grows and ripens
precociously when two people are busy together so that they depend on
each other at every instant, as teacher and pupil, or as the chief actor
and actress in a play, or as a man and a woman who are suddenly thrown
together in adventure or danger.

When Stradella put his lute back into the purple bag at last, telling
Ortensia that she had sung enough for one morning and that she must not
tire her voice, she felt as if this could not possibly have been her
first meeting with him. His face, his tone, his gestures, the way he
held his lute, were all as familiar to her already as if he had given
her half-a-dozen lessons; and when he was gone and she sat once more in
her chair looking at the top of the cypress tree against the noonday
sky, she saw and heard all again, and then again; but she neither saw
nor heard her nurse, who had laid aside the lace-pillow and was standing
at her elbow telling her that it was time for the mid-day meal and that
her uncle did not like to be kept waiting. The nurse spoke three times
before Ortensia heard her and looked up.

'They say well that music is a thief,' observed the middle-aged woman in
grey, enigmatically, as she stood with her hands folded under her black
apron, gazing intently at Ortensia's face.

The young girl laughed as she rose.

'Poor old Pina!' she answered, tapping her forehead with one finger as
if to say that the nurse was weak-minded.

But Pina smiled, and made three gestures, without saying a word: first
she pointed to herself, then she shook her forefinger, and lastly she
jerked her thumb back in the direction of the door that led to the
Senator's apartments. The weak-minded body was not Pina, but her master,
since he had brought that handsome singer to teach Ortensia, who had
never before exchanged two words with any young man, handsome or plain,
except under the nose of the Senator himself; and that had always been
at those great festivals to which the Venetian nobles took their wives
and daughters, even when the latter were very young, to show off their
fine clothes and jewels, though it meant comparing them publicly with
quite another class of beauties.

For the Venetian maxim was that women and girls wer