and Liszt had blessed her and Leschetitsky said that she
had nothing to learn. Her very origin belonged to the realm of romantic
fiction. Her father, a Polish music-master in New Orleans, had run away
with his pupil, a beautiful Spanish girl of a good Creole family. Their
child had been born in Cracow while the Austrians were bombarding it in
1848.

The lights were now all up and the stalls filling. Ladies and gentlemen
from the suburbs, over early, were the first comers; eager schoolgirls
marshalled by governesses; scrupulous students with music under their
arms, and, finally, the rustling, shining, chattering crowd of
fashionable London.

The massive lady had by now her little audience, cowed, if still
slightly sulky, well in hand. She pointed out each notability to them,
and indirectly, to all her neighbours. The Duchess of Bannister and Lady
Champney, the famous beauty; the Prime Minister, whom the girls could
have recognized for themselves, and Sir Alliston Compton, the poet. Had
they read his sonnet to Madame Okraska, last year, in the "Fortnightly"?
They had not. "I wonder who that odd looking girl is with him and the
old lady?" one of them ventured.

"A little grand-daughter, a little niece," said the massive lady, who
did not know. "Poor Sir Alliston's wife is in a lunatic asylum; isn't it
a melancholy head?"

But now one of her listeners, a lady also in the front row, leaned
forward to say hurriedly and deprecatingly, her face suffused with
shyness: "That nice young girl is Madame Okraska's adopted daughter. The
old lady is Mrs. Forrester, Madame Okraska's great friend; my
sister-in-law was for many years a governess in her family, and that is
how I come to know."

All those who had heard her turned their eyes upon the young girl, who,
in an old-fashioned white cloak, with a collar of swansdown turned up
round her fair hair, was taking her place with her companions in the
front row of the orchestra-stalls. Even the massive lady was rapt away
to silence.

"But I thought the adopted daughter was an Italian," one girl at last
commented, having gazed her fill at the being so exalted by fortune.
"Her skin is rather dark, but that yellow hair doesn't look Italian."

"She is a Norwegian," said the massive lady, keeping however an eye on
the relative of Mrs. Forrester's governess; "the child of Norwegian
peasants. Don't you know the story? Madame Okraska found the poor little
creature lost in a Norwegian for