-courted Leonora descended from her lofty heights to seek a man's
attention and came with her amorous advances to disturb the placid calm
of that artist so wholly engrossed in the cult of the sublime Master.

Hans Keller noticed the smile that fell like a sunbeam upon his music
scrolls. He closed them and let himself be drawn off on the by-paths of
love. Leonora's life with the _maestro_ was an absolute rupture with all
her past. Her one wish was to love and be loved--to throw a cloak of
mystery over her real self, ashamed as she now was of her previous wild
career. Her passion enthralled the musician and she in turn felt at once
stirred and transfigured by the atmosphere of artistic fervor that
haloed the illustrious pupil of Wagner.

The spirit of Him, the Master, as Hans Keller called Wagner with pious
adoration, flashed before the singer's eyes like the revealing glory
that converted Paul on the road to Damascus. Music, as she now saw
clearly for the first time, was not a means of pleasing crowds,
displaying physical beauty, and attracting men. It was a religion--the
mysterious power that brings the infinite within us into contact with
the infinite that surrounds us. She became the sinner awakening to
repentance, and yearning for the atoning peace of the cloister, a
Magdalen of Art, touched on the high road of worldliness and frivolity
by the mystic sublimity of the Beautiful; and she cast herself at the
feet of Him, the supreme Master, as the most victorious of men, lord of
the mystery that moves all souls.

"Tell me more about Him," Leonora would say. "How much I would give to
have known him as you did!... I did see him once in Venice: during his
last days ...he was already dying."

And that meeting was, indeed, one of her most vivid and lasting
memories. The declining afternoon enlivening the dark waters of the
Grand Canal with its opalescent spangles; a gondola passing hers in the
opposite direction; and inside, a pair of blue, imperious eyes, shining,
under thick eyebrows, with the cold glint of steel--eyes that could
never be mistaken for common eyes, for the divine fire of the Elect, of
the demi-God, was bright within them! And they seemed to envelop her in
a flash of cerulean light. It was He--ill, and about to die. His heart
was wounded, bleeding, pierced, perhaps, by the shafts of mysterious
melody, as hearts of the Virgin sometimes bleed on altars bristling with
swords.

Leonora could still see him a