had just sung,--just as she consented,
a look from the 'Dottore' shot across the room and met her eyes;
she immediately hesitated, begged to be permitted not to sing, and
immediately afterwards withdrew."

"How strange!" said the nobleman who spoke before, "how very strange! It
was but a few nights since, at the Opera, I witnessed the deference and
submission with which she addressed him, and the cold indifference with
which he met looks and heard tones that, would have made another's heart
beat beyond his bosom. It must, indeed, be a strange mystery that unites
two beings so every way unlike;--one all beauty and loveliness, and
the other the most sarcastic, treacherous-looking wretch, ever my eyes
beheld."

The deep interest with which I listened to those particulars of my
rival--for such I now felt her to be--gradually yielded to a sense of
my own sunken and degraded condition; and envy, the most baleful and
pernicious passion that can agitate the bosom, took entire possession of
me: envy of one whose very existence one hour before I was ignorant of.
I felt that _she--she_ had injured me,--robbed me of all for which life
and existence was dear. But for _her_, I should still be the centre
of this gay and brilliant assembly, by whom I am already forgotten and
neglected: and, with a fiendish malignity, I thought how soon this new
idol of a fickle and ungrateful people would fall from the pinnacle from
which she had displaced me, and suffer in her own heart the cruel pangs
I was then enduring.

I arose from where I had been sitting, my brain maddened with my sudden
reverse of fortune, and fled from the salon to my home* In an agony of
grief I threw myself upon my bed, and that night was to me like years of
sorrowing and affliction.

When morning broke, my first resolve was to leave Dresden for ever; my
next to remain, until, by applying all my energies to the task, I had
accomplished something beyond all my former efforts; and then, spurning
the praise and flattery my success would inspire, take a proud farewell
of my fickle and ungrateful countrymen. The longer I thought upon,
the more was I pleased with, this latter resolution, and panted with
eagerness for the moment of contemptuous disdain, in which, flinging
off the caresses of false friends, I should carry to other lands those
talents which my own was unworthy to possess. It was but a few days
before this the Prior of the Augustine monastery had called upon me,