words.

'They are all so much alike that they almost produce the impression of
having been written by the same person.'

That was what he had really said, and Ortensia had laughed sweetly and
cruelly; and even Pina, busy with her lace-pillow, had smiled with evil
satisfaction in her corner, for she was a clever woman, who had been
educated above her present station, and she understood.

Further, the Senator asked whether Stradella ever attempted to enter
into conversation with his pupil, between one piece of music and the
next.

'Conversation!' cried the young girl indignantly. 'He would not dare!'

If Pignaver noticed the slight blush that came with the words, he set it
down to just anger at the mere suggestion that his future wife could
stoop to talk with a music-master. Yet, being of a suspicious nature,
he also made inquiries of Pina, whom he unwisely trusted even more than
Ortensia herself.

'Conversation, Excellency? Your Excellency's niece in conversation with
a fiddler, a public singer, a creature little better than a mountebank!
My lady Ortensia would as soon talk with a footman! Shame, my lord! The
suspicion is unworthy! I would scarcely answer to the young man himself,
if he spoke to me, though I am only a poor servant! A fiddler, indeed! A
lute-strummer, a catgut-pincher, and a Neapolitan into the bargain!'

Thus did Pina express herself, and while her rather hard grey eyes
seemed to flash with anger, her mouth, that had once been handsome,
curved in lines of scorn that were almost aristocratic.

It is as easy to deceive a very vain person in matters where vanity has
a part to play as it is to cheat a blind man, and Pignaver was
hoodwinked without difficulty by his niece and her nurse, and the love
that had sprung up between the two young people almost at first sight
grew at an amazing rate while they sang and looked at one another over
their lutes.

But the first word had not been spoken yet, though it had been sung many
times by both, separately and together. It was not that Stradella
doubted how it would be received, if he spoke it when Pina was out of
the room, nor was Ortensia not eager for it long before it came. Yet she
could not be the first, and he would not, for reasons she understood so
little that at last she began to resent his silence as if it were a
slight. Few Italian girls of her age have ever known that sensation,
which is familiar enough to many women of the world.

Stradella