Applauded by select publics, courted in her dressing-room by celebrated men and women, Leonora began to find Salvatti’s tyranny unbearable.  She now saw him as he really was:  miserly, petulant, spoiled by praise.  Every bit of her money that came into his hands disappeared, she knew not where.  Eager for revenge, though really answering the lure of the elegant world she glimpsed in the distance but was not yet a part of, she began to deceive Salvatti in passing adventures, taking a diabolical pleasure in the deceit.  But no; as she looked back on that part of her life with the sober eye of experience, she understood that she had really been the one deceived.  Salvatti, she remembered, would always retire at the opportune moment, facilitating her infidelities.  She understood now that the man had carefully prepared such adventures for her with influential men whom he himself introduced to make certain profits out of the meeting—­profits that he never declared.

After three years of this sort of life, when Leonora had reached the full splendor of her beauty, she chanced to become the favorite of fashion for one whole summer at Nice.  Parisian newspapers, in their “society columns” referred, in veiled language, to the passion of an aged king, a democratic monarch, who had left his throne, much as a manufacturer of London or a stockbroker of Paris would leave his office, for a vacation on the Blue Coast.  This tall, robust gentleman with a patriarchal beard—­the very type of the good king in fairy tales—­had not hesitated to be seen in public with a beautiful artiste.

That conquest, fleeting though it had been, put the finishing touch on Leonora’s eminence!  “Ah!  La Brunna!” people would declare enthusiastically.  “The favorite of king Ernesto....  Our greatest artist.”  And troops of adorers began to besiege her under the keen, mercenary eyes of the tenor Salvatti.

About this time her father died in a hospital at Milan—­a very sad end, as Signora Isabella, the former ballet-dancer, explained in her letters.  Of what had he died?...  The old lady could not say, as the physicians had differed; but her own view of the matter was that the povero signor spagnuolo had simply grown tired of living—­a general collapse of that wonderful constitution, so strong, so powerful, in a way, yet strangely susceptible to moral and emotional influences.  He was almost blind when admitted to the hospital.  He seemed quite to have lost his mind—­sunk in an unbreakable silence.  Isabella had not dared to keep him in her house after he had fallen into that coma.  But the strange thing was, that as death drew near, his memory of the past suddenly cleared, and the nurses would hear him groan for nights at a time, murmuring in Spanish with tenacious persistency: 

“Leonora!  My darling!  Where are you?...  Little girl, where are you?”

Leonora wept and wept, and did not leave her hotel for more than a week, to the great disgust of Salvatti, who observed, in addition, that tears were not good for her complexion.