arrangements for a duel, which had been fought at sunrise, with pistols.  Selivestroff died in the arms of his mistress, smiling, seeking those delicate, powerful, pearly hands for one last time with his bleeding lips.  Leonora mourned him deeply, truly.  The land where she had been so happy with the first man she had really loved became intolerable to her, and abandoning most of the riches that the count had given her, she went forth into the world again, storming the great theatres in a new fever of travel and adventure.

She was then just twenty-three, but already felt herself an old woman.  How she had changed!...  More affairs?  As she went over that period of her life in her talk with Rafael, Leonora closed her eyes with a shudder of modesty and remorse.  Drunk with fame and power she had rushed about the world lavishing her beauty on anyone who interested her for the moment.  The property of everybody and of nobody!  She could not remember the names, even, of all the men who had loved her during that era of madness, so many had been caught in the wake of her stormy flight across the world!  She had returned to Russia once, and been expelled by the Czar for compromising the prestige of the Imperial Family, through an affair with a grand duke who had wanted to marry her.  In Rome she had posed in the nude for a young and unknown sculptor out of pure compassion for his silent admiration; and she herself made his “Venus” public, hoping that the world-wide scandal would bring fame to the work and to its author.  In Genoa she found Salvatti again, now “retired,” and living on usury from his savings.  She received him with an amiable smile, lunched with him, treated him as an old comrade; and at dessert, when he had become hopelessly drunk, she seized a whip and avenged the blows she had received in her time of slavery to him, beating him with a ferocity that stained the apartment with gore and brought the police to the hotel.  Another scandal!  And this time her name bandied about in a criminal court!  But she, a fugitive from justice, and proud of her exploit, sang in the United States, wildly acclaimed by the American public, which admired the combative Amazon even more than the artist.

There she made the acquaintance of Hans Keller, the famous orchestra conductor, and a pupil and friend of Wagner.  The German maestro became her second love.  With stiff, reddish hair, thick-rimmed eyeglasses, an enormous mustache that drooped over either side of his mouth and framed his chin, he was certainly not so handsome as Selivestroff.  But he had one irresistible charm, the charm of Art.  With the tragic Russian in her mind and on her conscience, she felt the need of burning herself in the immortal flame of the ideal; and she adored the famous musician for the artistic associations that hovered about him.  For the first time, the much-courted Leonora descended from her lofty heights to seek a man’s attention and came with her amorous advances to disturb the placid calm of that artist so wholly engrossed in the cult of the sublime Master.