that it ever was or would be more than acquaintance, liking,
appreciation, friendship, in successive stages. Von Francius had never
from the first treated her as an ordinary person, but with a kind of
tacit understanding that something not to be spoken of lay behind all
she did and said, with the consciousness that the skeleton in Adelaide's
cupboard was more ghastly to look upon than most people's secret
specters, and that it persisted, with an intrusiveness and want of
breeding peculiar to guests of that caliber, in thrusting its society
upon her at all kinds of inconvenient times.

I enjoyed these music lessons, I must confess. Von Francius had begun to
teach me music now, as well as singing. By this time I had resigned
myself to the conviction that such talent as I might have lay in my
voice, not my fingers, and accepted it as part of the conditions which
ordain that in every human life shall be something _manque_, something
incomplete.

The most memorable moments with me have been those in which pain and
pleasure, yearning and satisfaction, knowledge and seeking, have been so
exquisitely and so intangibly blended, in listening to some deep sonata,
some stately and pathetic old _ciacconna_ or gavotte, some concerto or
symphony; the thing nearest heaven is to sit apart with closed eyes
while the orchestra or the individual performer interprets for one the
mystic poetry, or the dramatic fire, or the subtle cobweb refinements of
some instrumental poem.

I would rather have composed a certain little "Traumerei" of Schumann's
or a "Barcarole" of Rubinstein's, or a sonata of Schubert's than have
won all the laurels of Grisi, all the glory of Malibran and Jenny Lind.

But it was not to be. I told myself so, and yet I tried so hard in my
halting, bungling way to worship the goddess of my idolatry, that my
master had to restrain me.

"Stop!" said he this morning, when I had been weakly endeavoring to
render a _ciacconna_ from a suite of Lachner's, which had moved me to
thoughts too deep for tears at the last symphonie concert. "Stop,
Fraeulein May! Duty first; your voice before your fingers."

"Let me try once again!" I implored.

He shut up the music and took it from the desk.

"_Entbehren sollst du; sollst entbehren!_" said he, dryly.

I took my lesson and then practiced shakes for an hour, while he talked
to Adelaide; and then, she being summoned to visitors, he went away.

Later I found Adelaide in the midst