"Oh, yes! I would act to any music, not because I am vain, but because I think I could help it upwards a little. Then there is a great deal for us: we cannot quarrel over Mozart and Cimarosa, neither Gluck nor Spohr; and there is one, but I need hardly name him, who wrote 'Fidelio.' And the Chevalier says if there needed a proof that the highest acting is worthy of the highest music, the highest music of the highest form or outward guise of love in its utmost loveliness, that opera stands as such. And, further, that all the worst operas, and ill-repute of them in the world, will not weigh against the majesty and purity of Beethoven's own character in the opposing scale." "Oh! thank you for having such a memory." "I have a memory in my memory for those things." "Yes, I know. Does the Chevalier know you are to marry Anastase?" "No." I was surprised at this, though she said it so very simply; she looked serene as that noonday sky, and very soon she went on to say: "Florimond, my friend, is very young, though I look up to him as no one else could believe. I am but fifteen, you know, and have yet been nearly three years betrothed." "Gracious! you were only a little girl." "Not much less than now. I don't think you would ever have called me a little girl, and Florimond says I shall never be a woman. I wished to tell the Chevalier, thinking he would be so good as to congratulate me, and hoping for such a blessing; but I have never found myself able to bring it out of my lips. I always felt it withdraw, as if I had no reason, and certainly I had no right, to confide my personal affairs to him. Our intercourse is so different." "Yes, I should think so. I wonder what you generally talk about." "Never yet of anything but music." "That is strange, because the Chevalier does not usually talk so,--but of little things, common things he makes so bright; and Franz tells me, and so did another of our boys, that he only talks of such small affairs generally, and avoids music." "So I hear from my brother. He talks to Josephine about her doll. He did tell me once that with me alone he 'communed music.'" "Again his words!" She assented by her flying smile. "He never plays to you, then?" "Never to myself; but then, you see, I should never ask him." "And he would not do it unless he were asked. I understand that. You feel as I should about asking _you_." "Me to sing?" she inquired in a tone beguiling, lingering, an echo of _his_ voice ever sleepless in my brain, or that if sleeping, ever awoke to music. I nodded. "No," said she again, with quickness, "I will not wait to be asked." As she spoke she arose, and those dark streams of hair fell off her like some shadow from her spirit; she shone upon me in rising,--so seemed her smile. "Oh!" I cried eagerly, and I caught, by some impulse, the hem of her garment, "you are going to be so good!"