o profit by her naive
admiration. Was it love that thrust her toward him? As, so long
afterwards, she analyzed her passion to Rafael, she was vehemently
certain it had not been love: Salvatti could never have inspired a
genuine feeling in anyone. His egotism, his moral corruptness, were too
close to the surface. No, he was a philanderer simply, an exploiter of
women. But for her it had been a blinding hallucination nevertheless,
fraught, during the first days, at least, with the delicious
exhiliration, the voluptuous abandonment of true love. She became the
slave of the decrepit tenor, voluntarily, just as she had become her
_maestro's_ slave through fear. And so complete had her infatuation
been, so overpowering its intoxication, that, in obedience to Salvatti,
she fled with him at the end of the season, and deserted her father, who
had objected to the intimacy.

Then came the black page in her life, that filled her eyes with
anguished tears as she went on with her story. What folks said about her
father's end was not true. Poor Doctor Moreno had not committed suicide.
He was altogether too proud to confess in that way the deep grief that
her ingratitude had caused him.

"Don't talk to me about that woman," he would say fiercely to his
landlady at Milan whenever the old _danseuse_ would mention Leonora. "I
have no daughter: it was all a mistake."

Unbeknown to Salvatti, who became terribly grasping as he saw his power
waning, Leonora would send her father a few hundred francs from London,
from Naples, from Paris. The Doctor, though in direst poverty, would at
once return the checks "to the sender" and, without writing a word;
where-upon Leonora paid an allowance every month to the housekeeper,
begging her not to abandon the old man.

The unhappy Doctor needed, indeed, all the care the landlady and her old
friends could give him. The _povero signor spagnuolo_--the poor Spanish
gentleman--spent his days locked up in his room, his violoncello between
his knees, reading Beethoven, the only one "in his family"--as he
said--"who had never played him false." When old Isabella, tired of his
music, would literally put him out of the house to get a breath of air,
he would wander like a phantom through the Gallery, distantly greeted
by former friends, who avoided closer contact with that black
despondency and feared the explosions of rage with which he received
news of his daughter's rising fame.

A rapid rise she was makin