The anthem finished, the royal party took their seats, the opera began. Ranata kept her eyes resolutely bent upon the stage, but although she felt and had been severely drilled in music, hers was the imagination which escapes control under the influence of the only art that penetrates to the key-notes of being. The spell of the limpid semi-religious music swirled round her like a soft tide. She saw far beyond the poor juggler apologizing to the Virgin for desecrating her name that he might gratify a heartless rabble and keep his wretched body from starving; and if she forbade her eyes to wander over the house, every nerve told her that Fessenden Abbott was not there. She had asked him to leave Hungary immediately upon his return to Budapest, and she knew that if he had not done so--he must await important telegrams--he would not come to the palace, nor to any gathering where she was sure to be. And to attend the opera except in her train would have excited the comment both wished to avoid. Whether he had gone or not she did not know, for she would not ask Alexandra; if indeed her friend knew, for the brother and sister had said good-bye at the station in Budapest. Ranata, who had been gifted with no greater measure of consistency than the rest of her sex, had hoped to see him while driving, while entering the opera-house, to receive from him some swift involuntary token that he was thinking of her as persistently as she was of him. For she thought of little else, and she was aghast at the power of love to defy the will. The emotional struggle had induced a physical lassitude she had never known before. That morning she had risen with the thought, “Am I going to send for him to-day? Am I? _Am I?_” And the question had risen again and again, acquainting her for the first time with the insolent defiance of the fixed idea to the higher qualities of the brain. She had had experience of the dual entity in the mental household before, but never so complete a sense of division, nor of possession by faculties which seemed to have forced an entrance into her mind rather than have risen from its depths.