In the middle of the study there stood a splendid piano, the gift of an enthusiastic circle of admirers, who wished to offer a visible testimony of their thanks to the master; the writing-table was covered with cards and letters, which bore the names of the first people in the kingdom, both as regards birth and genius, and which here were indifferently thrust aside, without the recipient placing the least value on them; from the principal wall, a life-sized picture of Beatrice Biancona looked down, painted by a celebrated hand, most charmingly represented, a really speaking likeness. She wore the fanciful costume of one of her chief parts in an opera of Rinaldo's, through the successful representation of whose works she herself had only risen to be an actress of the first order. The painter had succeeded in embodying the utterly infatuating magic, the glowing charm of the original, in this portrait. The beautiful figure appeared half-turned to the piano in an inimitably graceful pose, and the dark eyes gazed with deceptively life-like truth down upon the man whom they had kept so long already in indissoluble bonds, as if even here, in the sacred place of his works and labour, they would not leave him alone. CHAPTER IX. Reinhold sat at his piano, improvising. The room was not lighted, only the moon's rays, streaming fully in, hung over the flood of tones, which now rose as if the storm were raging in its waves, now rolling up mountains high, and then again disclosing the depths of an abyss. The melodies flowed forth passionately, glowing, intoxicatingly, and then suddenly they would start and change as if to harsh dissonance, to jarring discord. Those were the tones with which Rinaldo for years had reigned in the realms of music, with which he carried the crowd away to admiration; perhaps because they lent language to that demon-like element which slumbers in every one's breast, and of which every one is conscious, partly with dread, partly with secret shuddering. There lay, too, in these melodies something of that wild rush from pleasure to pleasure, of that rapid change from feverish excitement to deadly exhaustion, from that striving to benumb all feeling, which, sought for ever, is never found; and yet there rang forth something powerful, eternal, which had nothing in common with that element with which it fought, and which was raised above it, only to be wrecked within it at last.