The curtain went up, and Nino stood there, looking like a real monk, with a book in his hand and his eyes cast down, as he began to walk slowly along.  I saw Hedwig von Lira’s gaze rest on his square, pale face at least one whole minute.  Then she gave a strange little cry, so that many people in the house looked towards her; and she leaned far back in the shadow of the deep box, while the reflected glare of the footlights just shone faintly on her features, making them look more like marble than ever.  The baroness was smiling to herself, amused at her companion’s surprise, and the old count stared stolidly for a moment or two, and then turned suddenly to his daughter.

“Very curious is it,” he was probably saying, “that this tenor should so much your Italian professor resemble.”  I could almost see his gray eyes sparkle angrily across the theatre.  But as I looked, a sound rose on the heated air, the like of which I have never known.  To tell the truth, I had not heard the first two acts, for I did not suppose there was any great difference between Nino’s singing on the stage and his singing at home, and I still wished he might have chosen some other profession.  But when I heard this I yielded, at least for the time, and I am not sure that my eyes were as clear as usual.

“Spirto gentil dei sogni miei”—­the long sweet notes sighed themselves to death on his lips, falling and rising magically like a mystic angel song, and swaying their melody out into the world of lights and listeners; so pathetic, so heart-breaking, so laden with death and with love, that it was as though all the sorrowing souls in our poor Rome breathed in one soft sigh together.  Only a poor monk dying of love in a monastery, tenderly and truly loving to the bitter end.  Dio mio! there are perhaps many such.  But a monk like this, with a face like a conqueror, set square in its whiteness, and yet so wretched to see in his poor patched frock and his bare feet; a monk, too, not acting love, but really and truly ready to die for a beautiful woman not thirty feet from him in the house; above all, a monk with a voice that speaks like the clarion call of the day of judgment in its wrath, and murmurs more plaintively and sadly in sorrow than ever the poor Peri sighed at the gates of Paradise—­such a monk, what could he not make people feel?

The great crowd of men and women sat utterly stilled and intent till he had sung the very last note.  Not a sound was heard to offend the sorrow that spoke from the boy’s lips.  Then all those people seemed to draw three long breaths of wonder—­a pause, a thrilling tremor in the air, and then there burst to the roof such a roar of cries, such a huge thunder of hands and voices, that the whole house seemed to rock with it, and even in the street outside they say the noise was deafening.