“When I arrived I was at first refused entrance to the room. But my mind was fully made up. I was determined that no power on earth should now keep us longer apart. I simply said: ‘If he is really dying, then my presence can harm him no longer, and I insist upon being admitted!’ So they let me in. But it was a terrible shock to see him, so changed that at first I should hardly have known him. Only his eyes, those dear, loving eyes, were still the same, and as they fixed themselves on me I had the happiness of seeing the full light of recognition come back to them. ‘Ah! my own!’ he exclaimed, stretching out his arms toward me. He was frightfully weak, having of late refused all nourishment, under the delusion that the attendants wished to poison him. I could, however, prevail on him to take a little food when I brought it to him, and his eyes never left me, following my every movement. In the midst of my sorrow I yet felt a contentment at my heart that I had not known during these last years, whilst I was separated from him. I might almost say I was happy once more, just in being with him, and in feeling that his affection was unchanged. But it could not last long--his strength was ebbing fast--soon came the last parting, and then all was over, and I was really alone in the wide world, with my poor, fatherless children!” She broke down completely on these last words, and for some minutes we sat together in perfect silence, my tears flowing in sympathy, for I was deeply moved at witnessing her grief. Her story was made the more touching by the simplicity with which it was told; this went to my heart more surely than the most studied eloquence. And it was ever the one theme--always of _him_ she spoke! She came back constantly to this one period of life, as if all the rest--everything that had taken place since--did not count at all. Evidently her own life had come to an end for her when her husband died. If she lived on at all it was simply in the idea of contributing to raise a monument to his fame. She was really quivering with indignation when she related how on one occasion, after one of her recitals, a lady had actually asked her if her husband had not also been a pianist? But my contemptuous exclamation, “Oh, the poor thing!” made her smile in spite of herself. I remember, too, how I could never satisfy her with my rendering of the little piece called “Happiness enough.” She was always entreating me to put more fullness and softness into it, to make it overflow, so to say, with happiness. And in the depths of her eyes I read the triumphant certitude that this music told the happiness that had once been hers, and that to none other would it ever be given to express it as she could. Ah! those were precious hours, indeed, which I passed with her, and the lessons were something much more to me than mere music-lessons, for even greater and nobler than the _artist_ was the _woman_ I learnt to know in them.