were too close to the surface.  No, he was a philanderer simply, an exploiter of women.  But for her it had been a blinding hallucination nevertheless, fraught, during the first days, at least, with the delicious exhiliration, the voluptuous abandonment of true love.  She became the slave of the decrepit tenor, voluntarily, just as she had become her maestro’s slave through fear.  And so complete had her infatuation been, so overpowering its intoxication, that, in obedience to Salvatti, she fled with him at the end of the season, and deserted her father, who had objected to the intimacy.

Then came the black page in her life, that filled her eyes with anguished tears as she went on with her story.  What folks said about her father’s end was not true.  Poor Doctor Moreno had not committed suicide.  He was altogether too proud to confess in that way the deep grief that her ingratitude had caused him.

“Don’t talk to me about that woman,” he would say fiercely to his landlady at Milan whenever the old danseuse would mention Leonora.  “I have no daughter:  it was all a mistake.”

Unbeknown to Salvatti, who became terribly grasping as he saw his power waning, Leonora would send her father a few hundred francs from London, from Naples, from Paris.  The Doctor, though in direst poverty, would at once return the checks “to the sender” and, without writing a word; where-upon Leonora paid an allowance every month to the housekeeper, begging her not to abandon the old man.

The unhappy Doctor needed, indeed, all the care the landlady and her old friends could give him.  The povero signor spagnuolo—­the poor Spanish gentleman—­spent his days locked up in his room, his violoncello between his knees, reading Beethoven, the only one “in his family”—­as he said—­“who had never played him false.”  When old Isabella, tired of his music, would literally put him out of the house to get a breath of air, he would wander like a phantom through the Gallery, distantly greeted by former friends, who avoided closer contact with that black despondency and feared the explosions of rage with which he received news of his daughter’s rising fame.

A rapid rise she was making in very truth!  The worldly old women who foregathered in the ballet-dancer’s little parlor, could not contain their admiration for their “little girl’s” success; and even grew indignant at the father for not accepting things “as things had to be.”  Salvatti?  Just the support she needed!  An expert pilot, who knew the chart of the opera world, who would steer her straight and keep her off the rocks.

The tenor had skilfully organized a world wide publicity for his young singer.  Leonora’s beauty and her artistic verve conquered every public.  She had contracts with the leading theatres of Europe, and though critics found defects in her singing, her beauty helped them to forget these, and one and all they contributed loyally to the deification of the young goddess.  Salvatti, sheltering his old age under this prestige which he so religiously fostered, was keeping in harness to the very end, and taking leave of life under the protecting shadow of that woman, the last to believe in him and tolerate his exploitation.