, then the young girl started up, seized one of
the torches A cast its light on her regained sister's face. How pale, how
emaciated it looked! But it was still beautiful, still the same as
before. Strangely-blended emotions of joy and grief took possession of
Henrica's soul. Her cold hard feelings grew warm and melted, and in this
hour the comfort of tears, of which she had been so long deprived, once
more became hers.

Gradually the flood tide of emotion began to ebb, and the confusion of
loving exclamations and incoherent words gained some order and separated
into question and answer. When Anna learned that the musician had
accompanied her sister, she wished to see him, and when he entered, held
out both hands, exclaiming:

"Meister, Meister, in what a condition you find me again! Henrica, this
is the best of men; the only unselfish friend I have found on earth."

The succeeding hours were full of sorrowful agitation.

Belotti and the old Italian woman often undertook to speak for the
invalid, and gradually the image of a basely-destroyed life, that had
been worthy of a better fate, appeared before Henrica and Wilhelm. Fear,
anxiety and torturing doubt had from the first saddened Anna's existence
with the unprincipled adventurer and gambler, who had succeeded in
beguiling her young, experienced heart. A short period of intoxication
was followed by an unexampled awakening. She was clasping her first child
to her breast, when the unprecedented outrage occurred--Don Luis demanded
that she should move with him into the house of a notorious Marchesa, in
whose ill-famed gambling-rooms he had spent his evenings and nights for
months. She indignantly refused, but he coldly and threateningly
persisted in having his will. Then the Hoogstraten blood asserted itself,
and without a word of farewell she fled with her child to Lugano. There
the boy was received by his mother's former waiting-maid, while she
herself went to Rome, not as an adventuress, but with a fixed,
praiseworthy object in view. She intended to fully perfect her musical
talents in the new schools of Palestrina and Nanini, and thus obtain the
ability, by means of her art, to support her child independently of his
father and hers. She risked much, but very definite hopes hovered before
her eyes, for a distinguished prelate and lover of music, to whom she had
letters of introduction from Brussels, and who knew her voice, had
promised that after her return from her