w ones together. 'I won't sing any
more. I want to live for you,' she would often say to her father with a
gentle smile, when people asked her to sing, and she was obliged to
refuse. Krespel endeavoured to spare her those trials, and this was why
he avoided taking her into society, and tried to taboo all music. He
knew, of course, what a pain it was to her to renounce the art which
she had cultivated to such perfection. When he bought the remarkable
violin already spoken of--the one which was buried with her--and was
going to take it to pieces, Antonia looked at him very sorrowfully, and
said, gently imploring him, 'This one, too?' Some indescribable impulse
constrained him to leave it untouched, and to play on it. Scarcely had
he brought out a few notes from it when Antonia cried, loudly and
joyfully, 'Ah! that is I--that is I singing again.' And of a verity its
silver bell-like tones had something quite extraordinarily wonderful
about them. They sounded as if they came out of a human heart. Krespel
was deeply affected. He played more gloriously than ever he had done
before. And when, with his fullest power, he would go storming over the
strings, in brilliant, sparkling scales and _arpeggios_, Antonia would
clap her hands and cry, delighted, 'Ah! I did that well. I did that
splendidly!' Often she would say to him, 'I should like to sing
something, father'; and then he would take the fiddle from the wall,
and play all her favourite solos, those which she used to sing of
old,--and then she was quite happy.

"A short time before I came back, Krespel one night thought he heard
some one playing on the piano in the next room, and presently he
recognized that it was B----, preluding in his accustomed rather
peculiar fashion. He tried to rise from his bed, but some strange heavy
weight seemed to lie upon him, fettering him there, so that he could
not move. Presently he heard Antonia singing to the piano, in soft
whispering tones, which gradually swelled, and swelled to the most
pealing _fortissimo_. Then those marvellous tones took the form of a
beautiful, glorious _aria_ which B---- had once written for Antonia, in
the religious style of the old masters. Krespel said the state in which
he found himself was indescribable, for terrible alarm was in it, and
also a bliss such as he had never before known. Suddenly he found
himself in the middle of a flood of the most brilliant and dazzling
light, and in this light he saw B---- an