So, plucking up heart of grace, though trembling all over, she tripped down the stage rocks with her free gait of a _sennerin_. To her joy and surprise, a burst of applause rose responsive at once from those seemingly irresponsive dress-coated stalls, those stolidly brutal and square-faced pittites. Her mere beauty stirred them. Even the gentlemen of the press, smiling cynically still, drummed their fingers gently on the flat tops of their opera-hats. Thus encouraged, Linnet opened her mouth and sang. Her throat rose and fell in a rhythmical tide. She rendered the first stanza of her first song almost faultlessly. She knew, herself, she had never sung better. Then came a brief pause before she went on to the second. During that pause, she raised her eyes to a box of the first tier. The Blessed Madonna in Britannia metal on the oval pendant, ever faithful at a pinch, almost crumpled in her grasp as she looked and started. It was Will she saw there, Will, Will, her dear Englishman; and Herr Florian by his elbow, and the grand foreign Frau, the fair-haired Frau, the Frau with the diamonds, ever still beside them! In a second, Linnet felt from head to foot a great thrill break over her. It broke like a wave of fire, in long, undulating movement, as she had felt it at Innsbruck. The wave rose from her feet, as before, and coursed hot through her limbs, and burnt bright in her body, till it came out as a crimson flush on neck and chin and forehead. Then it descended once more, thrilling through her as it went, in long, undulating movement, from her neck to her feet again. She felt it as distinctly as she could feel Our Blessed Lady clenched hard in her little fist. Her Englishman was there, whom she thought she had lost; as at Innsbruck, so in London, he had come to hear her sing her first song in public! All at once, yet again, the same strange seizure came over her. As her eyes met Will’s, and that wave of fire ran resistlessly through her, she was conscious of a weird sense she had known but once in all her life before—a sudden failure of sound, a numb deadening of the orchestra. Not a note struck her ear. It was all a vast blank to her. Instinctively, as she sang, her right hand toyed with Will’s coral necklet, but her left, with all its might, still gripped and clasped Our Lady with trembling fingers. She heard not a word she herself was uttering; she knew not how she sang, or whether she sang at all; in an agony of terror, of remorse, of shame, she kept her eyes fixed on the conductor’s _bâton_. By its aid alone she kept true to her accompaniment. But her heart went up silently in one great prayer to Our Lady. When she felt this at Innsbruck she knew it was love. If it meant love still—Andreas Hausberger’s wife—Oh! Blessed Mother, help! Oh! Dear Lady, protect her! CHAPTER XXX AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR