arts--so that he was
himself certainly at last soaring as high as the singer's voice and
forgetting, in a lost gaze at the splendid ceiling, everything of the
occasion but what his intelligence poured into it. This, as happened,
was a flight so sublime that by the time he had dropped his eyes again
a cluster of persons near the main door had just parted to give way to a
belated lady who slipped in, through the gap made for her, and stood for
some minutes full in his view. It was a proof of the perfect hush that
no one stirred to offer her a seat, and her entrance, in her high
grace, had yet been so noiseless that she could remain at once immensely
exposed and completely unabashed. For Berridge, once more, if the scenic
show before him so melted into the music, here precisely might have
been the heroine herself advancing to the foot-lights at her cue. The
interest deepened to a thrill, and everything, at the touch of his
recognition of this personage, absolutely the most beautiful woman now
present, fell exquisitely together and gave him what he had been wanting
from the moment of his taking in his young Englishman.

It was there, the missing connection: her arrival had on the instant
lighted it by a flash. Olympian herself, supremely, divinely Olympian,
she had arrived, could _only_ have arrived, for the one person present
of really equal race, our young man's late converser, whose flattering
demonstration might now stand for one of the odd extravagant forms taken
by nervous impatience. This charming, this dazzling woman had been one
member of the couple disturbed, to his intimate conviction, the autumn
previous, on his being pushed by the officials, at the last moment,
into a compartment of the train that was to take him from Cremona to
Mantua--where, failing a stop, he had had to keep his place. The other
member, by whose felt but unseized identity he had been haunted, was
the unconsciously insolent form of guaranteed happiness he had just been
engaged with. The sense of the admirable intimacy that, having taken
its precautions, had not reckoned with his irruption--this image had
remained with him; to say nothing of the interest of aspect of the
associated figures, so stamped somehow with rarity, so beautifully
distinct from the common occupants of padded corners, and yet on the
subject of whom, for the romantic structure he was immediately to raise,
he had not had a scrap of evidence.

If he had imputed to them cond