Faustina looked still more scared and bewildered than before at this sudden change of actors and of parts. She would gladly have left the room but she was incapable of anything of the kind—besides, where should she go? The scene seemed to swim before her eyes, and the lights to flicker. She sank down on her chair again.

The Prince had never looked so well. He was flushed with excitement, and the habitual insouciance of his manner had given place to a reality and earnestness of purpose which rendered eloquent his every gesture and look. He was exquisitely dressed in silk, embroidered with flowers. The priceless lace at his wrists and throat accommodated itself, with a delicate fulness, to the soft outline of his dress and figure. His expression was full of kindliness and protection, but of kindliness delicate and refined. The girl's eyes were fascinated in spite of herself.

"Have you quarrelled with the Maestro, Tina?" said the Prince. "He seemed in a marvellous hurry to be gone."

Faustina made two or three ineffectual attempts to speak before she could find her voice. She burst into tears.

"He is cruel! cruel!" she said. "He does not love me. He will not have me any longer. He throws me away."

"Poor child!" said the Prince, "you will not be deserted. I am your friend; we are all your friends. The Maestro even will come back to you. He is cross and angry. When he finds how lost he is without you and your lovely voice, he will come back to you; you and he will carry all before you again."

"Speak to him, Highness!" cried the girl passionately. "You are kind and good to all—kinder than any one to me. Speak to him! do not let him go without me! He cannot live without his music, and no one surely can know his music so well as I, whom he has taught!"

She looked so indescribably attractive in her tears and her distress that the Prince wondered at the sight. "Let her go, indeed!"

"Tina," he said very kindly, "I fear that can hardly be. The Maestro is only going for a time. There is, in fact, no need that he should go at all. It is his own wish, his own wish, Tina. He is too old to make his way among strangers, and will soon come back. But you we cannot spare. You are too much a favourite with us all. We are too much accustomed to you: every one would miss you—the Princess and all; you must stay with us."

"I cannot stay," said the girl, looking earnestly and beseechingly at the Prince. "I want to go with him."

The Prince hesitated for a moment. In an instantaneous flash of thought the two paths lay open before him, plain and clear to be seen. Carricchio's warning struck him again with renewed force. The more terrible presage of Mark's death cast itself, ghostlike, before his steps. He could plead no excuse of self-deception: he saw the beauty and the danger of the way which lay before him on either hand. He hesitated for a moment, then he deliberately chose the lower path.

"Tina," he said, "I cannot spare you; you must not go. You are mine—I love you; you belong to me;" and he stepped forward, as if to take her in his arms.

The girl sprang to her feet. She drew herself up to her full height, and her splendid eyes, expanded to their full orbit, flashed upon the Prince with a look of astonishment and reproach. With the entire power of her trained voice, which, magnificent as it was, could still but imperfectly render the reality of remonstrance and pathetic regret, she uttered but one word—"Prince!"

The cadence of her voice, trembling in the passionate intensity of musical tone, the whole power of her woman's nature, exerted to its full in expostulation and reproach—the magnetic force of her intense consciousness—struck upon the conscience and cultured taste of the Prince with crushing effect. He lost the perfectly serene tone of pose and demeanour which distinguished him and became him so well. He aged perceptibly, incredible as it may seem, ten years. The fatal step which he had taken was revealed to him in a moment as in a flash of light, with all the stain and taint with which it had tarnished the fair dream of finished art which he had conceived it possible to perfect. He was utterly demoralised and crushed. Mark's death was nothing to this. That had been a terrible mistake, but his part in it had been indirect, and his motive, at least so he flattered himself, comparatively high; but this action, so entirely his own, revealed to him, in its vulgar commonplaceness, by the glorious perfection of the girl's action and tone, withered him with a sense of irreparable failure and disgrace. He made one or two ineffectual attempts to rally; it was impossible—there was nothing for him but to leave the room.

Faustina was unconscious of his going. She found herself left alone. The situation was still not without its difficulties. She was alone, unattended by servants, she knew not where to go, how to leave the HÔtel. She lay for some time in a sort of swoon; then she rose and wandered from the room.

The only means of exit with which she was acquainted was through the curtains into the salon. She parted them and went out, hardly knowing what she did.

The vast salon was but dimly lighted, and no servants were to be seen; the whole house seemed silent and deserted—more especially these state apartments. She passed slowly and with faltering steps down the slippery floor of the salon, with its dimly-lighted candelabra of massive silver and its half-seen portraits, and, opening the great door at the opposite end, found herself in an antechamber which communicated with a grand staircase, both ascending and descending. To descend was evidently useless—she could not go out into the streets of Vienna alone at night and in her fanciful dress. She went up the wide staircase in the hope of finding some female domestics who would help her; as she reached the next flight the sound of music, subdued and solemn, fell upon her ear. She knew enough of German music to know that it was the tune of a hymn.

The door of the room from which the sound seemed to come stood partly open. She went in.

Before an harpsichord, with her hand carelessly passing over the keys, and her head turned at the sound of footsteps, stood the Princess Isoline. The light of a branched candelabra fell full upon her stately figure, revealing the compassionate, lofty expression of her beautiful face. The girl crossed the room towards her and fell on her knees at her feet.

"Child," said the Princess, "what is it? Why are you here?"

"I cannot tell," said the girl; and now at last she found it possible to weep. "I do not know what has happened. The Maestro has forsaken me, and I have insulted the Prince."

Gradually, in a broken way, she told her story, kneeling by the Princess, who stood serenely, her fingers still wandering over the harpsichord keys, her left hand caressing the girl's hair and cheek.

"He was a wonderful child," said the Princess at last, more to herself than to Faustina, for as she spoke she played again the simple notes of the Lutheran hymn. "He was truly a wonderful child. A very Christ-child, it seems to me, in his simple life and sudden death; for, though what he did was little, yet the lives of all of us seem different for his life—changed since his death. As for me, since his life crossed my path I have seen more, it seems to me, of the mercy of God and of Christ's working in paths and among lives where I never thought to look for it before."

Faustina did not reply, and the Princess played several bars of the hymn before she spoke again.

"Do you not see," she said at last, "the blessing it has been also to my brother the Prince?—for the desire that he felt, surely a noble one, to refine the life of art by the sacred touch of religion—the effort that he made, though it seemed a failure, and was made—it may be, I dare not judge him—blindly, and in a mistaken fashion; yet this effort has to-night proved his own salvation, through you."

She stopped, and again the notes of the hymn sounded through the room.

"Carricchio was right," she went on, "when he told the Prince that you alone of all of us had solved the riddle, for on you alone has art exercised its supreme, its magic touch, in drawing out and developing the emotions, the powers of the soul. You alone possessed the perfect gift of nature—the untainted well-spring of natural life—which assimilated Mark's spirit with your spirit, and reproduced his life within your own."

Faustina dropped the Princess's hand, which she had taken, and bent her head still lower, as if shrinking from her kindly praise.

"The Prince also had something of this gift, and, in so far as he had, he built up by his own action what, in his supreme need, saved him from his lower self. I have come to see that the world's virtues, which, in my self-righteous isolation, I despised, are often, as I blindly said to the boy, nearer Christ's than my vaunted ones; that the world-spirit is often the Christ-spirit, and that, when we begin to see that His footsteps may be traced in paths where we little expect to find them, we shall no longer dare to talk of the secular life. Your little brother that died was not without his work, and the canary even was the type of a nobler life, even as Mark's death was the type of a nobler death. In strange and unlooked-for ways the mission of sacrifice and love fulfils itself, and, living in the full light of its influence, we can never realise the blessing we have derived, the changed aspect of the race we have inherited, from the Cross of Christ."