th
the applause.

'What music, eh?' cried the Senator, with a grin of satisfied vanity.

'It is music indeed!' answered Stradella with a grave emphasis that
gave the words great weight. 'It has been my endeavour to do justice to
it, in instructing your gifted niece.'

'You have succeeded very well, dear Maestro,' Pignaver answered with
immense condescension. 'The world will be much your debtor when it hears
my melodies so charmingly sung!'

With this elephantine compliment the Senator nodded in a patronising way
and took himself off, while Stradella bowed politely at his departing
back.

When the curtain fell before the door, the singer turned to his pupil
and sat down in his accustomed seat, with great apparent
self-possession. Ortensia watched him, and her new-born resentment
increased quickly.

'What will it please you to study to-day?' he inquired, just as easily
as if it were not the very last time.

She felt much inclined to answer 'Nothing,' and to turn her back on him,
but somehow her pride found a voice for her, as indifferent as his own,
though she avoided his eyes and looked out of the window.

'It does not matter which song we take,' she answered. 'They are very
much alike, as you have often said!' She even laughed, quite lightly and
carelessly.

It was his turn to be surprised. Her tone was as natural and unstrained
as a child's. At the sound of it, he asked himself whether this slip of
a thing of seventeen years had not been acting emotions she had not
felt, and laughing at him while he had been singing his heart out to
her. Any clever girl could twist herself on her chair, and lay her cheek
to the back of it, turning away as if she were really suffering, and
twining her hands together till the little joints strained and turned
even whiter than the fingers themselves.

At the thought that she had perhaps made a fool of him, Stradella nearly
laughed, and he came near being cured then and there of his latest and
most serious love-sickness. His lute was lying on his knees; he began to
strum the opening chords of Pignaver's dullest composition, in the dull
mechanical way the music deserved. He thought the effect might be to
make Ortensia laugh and to change her mood.

But, to his annoyance, she rose, laid one hand on the back of the chair,
and proceeded to sing the song with the greatest care for details,
though by no means with the dashing spirit that had made him applaud her
first performance