f the rarest order, mellow and rich, but so soft that its
power was lost in its sweetness, and so exquisitely fresh in every note.

But the singer's charm was less in voice than in feeling; she conveyed
to the listener so much more than was said by the words, or even
implied by the music. Her song in this caught the art of the painter who
impresses the mind with the consciousness of a something which the eye
cannot detect on the canvas.

She seemed to breathe out from the depths of her heart the intense
pathos of the original romance, so far exceeding that of the opera,-the
human tenderness, the mystic terror of a tragic love-tale more solemn in
its sweetness than that of Verona.

When her voice died away no applause came,--not even a murmur. Isaura
bashfully turned round to steal a glance at her silent listener,
and beheld moistened eyes and quivering lips. At that moment she was
reconciled to her art. Graham rose abruptly and walked to the window.

"Do you doubt now if you are fond of music?" cried the Venosta.

"This is more than music," answered Graham, still with averted face.
Then, after a short pause, he approached Isaura, and said, with a
melancholy half-smile,--

"I do not think, Mademoiselle, that I could dare to hear you often; it
would take me too far from the hard real world: and he who would not be
left behindhand on the road that he must journey cannot indulge frequent
excursions into fairyland."

"Yet," said Isaura, in a tone yet sadder, "I was told in my childhood,
by one whose genius gives authority to her words, that beside the real
world lies the ideal. The real world then seemed rough to me. 'Escape,'
said my counsellor, 'is granted from that stony thoroughfare into the
fields beyond its formal hedgerows. The ideal world has its sorrows,
but it never admits despair.' That counsel then, methought, decided my
choice of life. I know not now if it has done so."

"Fate," answered Graham, slowly and thoughtfully, "Fate, which is not
the ruler but the servant of Providence, decides our choice of life, and
rarely from outward circumstances. Usually the motive power is within.
We apply the word 'genius' to the minds of the gifted few; but in all
of us there is a genius that is inborn, a pervading something which
distinguishes our very identity, and dictates to the conscience that
which we are best fitted to do and to be. In so dictating it compels our
choice of life; or if we resist the dictate, we f