Hans Keller noticed the smile that fell like a sunbeam upon his music scrolls.  He closed them and let himself be drawn off on the by-paths of love.  Leonora’s life with the maestro was an absolute rupture with all her past.  Her one wish was to love and be loved—­to throw a cloak of mystery over her real self, ashamed as she now was of her previous wild career.  Her passion enthralled the musician and she in turn felt at once stirred and transfigured by the atmosphere of artistic fervor that haloed the illustrious pupil of Wagner.

The spirit of Him, the Master, as Hans Keller called Wagner with pious adoration, flashed before the singer’s eyes like the revealing glory that converted Paul on the road to Damascus.  Music, as she now saw clearly for the first time, was not a means of pleasing crowds, displaying physical beauty, and attracting men.  It was a religion—­the mysterious power that brings the infinite within us into contact with the infinite that surrounds us.  She became the sinner awakening to repentance, and yearning for the atoning peace of the cloister, a Magdalen of Art, touched on the high road of worldliness and frivolity by the mystic sublimity of the Beautiful; and she cast herself at the feet of Him, the supreme Master, as the most victorious of men, lord of the mystery that moves all souls.

“Tell me more about Him,” Leonora would say.  “How much I would give to have known him as you did!...  I did see him once in Venice:  during his last days ...he was already dying.”

And that meeting was, indeed, one of her most vivid and lasting memories.  The declining afternoon enlivening the dark waters of the Grand Canal with its opalescent spangles; a gondola passing hers in the opposite direction; and inside, a pair of blue, imperious eyes, shining, under thick eyebrows, with the cold glint of steel—­eyes that could never be mistaken for common eyes, for the divine fire of the Elect, of the demi-God, was bright within them!  And they seemed to envelop her in a flash of cerulean light.  It was He—­ill, and about to die.  His heart was wounded, bleeding, pierced, perhaps, by the shafts of mysterious melody, as hearts of the Virgin sometimes bleed on altars bristling with swords.

Leonora could still see him as if he were there in front of her.  He looked smaller than he really was, dwarfed, apparently, by illness, and by the wrack of pain.  His huge head, the head of a genius, was bent low over the bosom of his wife Cosima.  He had removed the black felt hat so as to catch the afternoon breeze full upon his loose gray locks.  His broad, high curved forehead, seemed to weigh down upon his body like an ivory chest laden full of unseen jewels.  His arrogant nose, as strong as the beak of a bird of prey, seemed to be reaching across the sunken mouth toward the sensuous, powerful jaw.  A gray beard ran down along the neck, that was wrinkled, wasted with age.  A hasty vision it had been, to