‘But, my dear,’ said the minister, ‘how can you tell? an Italian heart may break in music?’ ‘Perhaps an Italian heart, but not Lucy Ashton’s,’ said Isabel, a wave of sudden colour passing over her face. How strange it was, out of this crown of her happy, peaceful existence to look back on the time when she had first read about Lucy Ashton, and understood. She was an uninstructed rustic, and had never heard any music in her life before. This historian says not a word in support of her way of thinking; but such was her ignorant opinion, out of the depths of her reticent Scotch heart, in which there lay so deep a sense of every emotion. It was her ignorance, no doubt, which suggested it. Anyone who had read the ‘Bride of Lammermoor’ to her, with the very least power of characteristic representation, could have played on her as on a delicate instrument; but she did not know how to understand the other form of the poem. It bewildered her. She was not in Heaven, but in the most curious artificial sphere. And then, what was that thing--those two black motionless glasses, fixed upon her from below? Whose was the turn of the head that seemed to appear to her behind them--the aspect of the half-seen figure lost among the crowd? She could not tell; but it all awoke the strangest thrill of uneasiness in her heart. ‘I should like to go home,’ she whispered to her husband. ‘Who is that always staring? And the music makes me dizzy. I should like to go home.’ ‘Staring, my darling! There are so many people staring,’ said Mr. Lothian; ‘and I am not surprised,’ he added, looking down upon her with fond admiration. The speech and the movement brought him forward to the front of the box. He took no notice of anything else, having his whole attention fixed upon his wife; but she saw a sudden movement below, and the direction of the opera-glasses change a little, as if the gaze was turned on her husband. The sensation to her was as if some dangerous being in a mask were watching them. And everything was so unreal--those people on the stage going through what was supposed to be the business of life in music, and the spectators periodically rousing themselves to a little paroxysm of frenzy, according to Isabel’s opinion. She had never seen anything so unreal and so strange; and it might be some enemy who was watching them for anything she knew----