s and sounds filled her with
indistinct visions of felicity. At night, when there was music in the
house, she crept from her bed to the staircase, and sat listening with
burning cheeks and icy hands.

Next day there came over her an immense, hazy discontent with
everything. And her tragic little face--her eyes, skin, and fluffy
hair all harmonized in the most delicate shade of brown--resembled the
face of some European _grande amoureuse_ seen through the small end of
an opera glass.

"Yes," said Miss Balbian at last to the charming, quiet ladies who sat
in her library drinking tea from old china cups. "Lilla is a strange,
I may say a startling, child." And allowing herself one of her rare
public failures of expression--a look of uneasiness--she added, half
swallowing her words, "I sometimes ask myself----"

CHAPTER III

Nearly every spring, Aunt Althea, craving "her beloved Europe," took
Lilla abroad.

Escorted by an elderly courier who had the appearance of a gentleman in
waiting at the Vatican, they moved with royal deliberation, patronizing
luxurious hotels, celebrated landscapes, notable art collections. The
governess was supplemented with the best local teachers of music and
languages; but it was Aunt Althea, with her proud fastidiousness, her
eclecticism at once virginal and ardent, who set the keynote for
Lilla's education.

All the young girl's inherited repugnances were enhanced. All her
sensibilities were aggravated. With the lapse of time and the
expansion of her world, her impassionable nature vibrated still more
extravagantly, at the most subtle stimuli, between the poles of
happiness and pain--which two sensations sometimes seemed to her
identical.

Now she was lovelier than her mother had ever been--a tall, fragile,
pale brown creature whose carefully composed lips, whose deliberately
slow grace, only half concealed that inner intensity of hers.

She had, indeed, the exceptional, agitating look--that softly fatal
aspect---which is seen in those who are destined to extraordinary
lives. It was as though strange, unprecipitated events were clinging
round her slender body like an aura: the promises of unparalleled
adventures in love, perhaps also in tragedy. Before her twentieth year
she had given this presentiment to many men, who, with a thrill that
may have been partly fear, longed to be the cause of those raptures,
and to accept the perils.

In an alley of Constantine, in fierc