ive music-lessons touched his father on a tender
point. 'And so,' Leopold writes, with more bitterness than he has ever
shown before in his letters--'and so you will throw away chances of
earning money, whilst your old father has to run from house to house
for a wretched pittance in order to support himself and his daughter,
and to send the little that remains to you, instead of paying his
debts!' He begs Wolfgang to reflect whether he was not treating him
as hardly as the Archbishop himself. Then follows a remark which
refers to Mozart's proneness to place undue reliance on promises,
instead of using his own judgment. 'You have judgment,' says Leopold,
'but a trifle too much of conceit and self-love, and you are inclined
to be over-confiding, and to open your heart to every one you meet.'

However, Wolfgang's stay in Mannheim was, after all, prolonged over
the winter, through the efforts which his friends made to procure him
work; but when the spring came round, and the three musicians whom he
had promised to accompany to Paris were ready to start upon their
journey, he found an excuse for letting them go without him. Leopold
Mozart was a deeply religious man, and when he learnt from Wolfgang
that his reason for breaking off his intended journey was that his
three companions had not a particle of religion in them, he approved
his son's judgment without expressing any surprise at the tardiness of
his discovery.

But Mozart had a deeper reason, which he was not so anxious to
disclose, and which perhaps he could not, without knowing his mind
exactly at the time, have explained. Be this as it may, however,
Mozart could never have been surer of anything than that his father
would have disapproved in the strongest manner of the feelings which
were swaying him at that moment. Yet if Leopold had but read between
the lines of his son's letters he must have seen why it was that
Wolfgang was seemingly so blind to his own interests, and so forgetful
of his duty to those who loved him at home. The fact is Wolfgang was
in love. And if the vigilant eye of the kindest and tenderest father
that ever watched with unremitting care over the welfare of a gifted
son could have pierced the space that separated him from Wolfgang at
the moment when he was perusing that letter of excuse, it might have
lighted upon the following little scene which was being enacted in the
parlour of a small house in Mannheim.

A young man is seated at the har