“Signorina!” he called softly.  No answer.  “Signorina!” he said again, coming across the empty street and standing under the window, which might have been thirty feet from the ground.

“Hush!” came a whisper from above.

“I thank you with all my soul for listening to me,” he said, in a low voice.  “I am innocent of that of which you suspect me.  I love you, ah, I love you!” But at this she left the window very quickly.  She did not close it, however, and Nino stood long, straining his eyes for a glimpse of the white face that had been there.  He sighed, and, striking a chord, sang out boldly the old air from the Trovatore, “Ah, che la morte ognora e tarda nel venir.”  Every blind fiddler in the streets plays it, though he would be sufficiently scared if death came any the quicker for his fiddling.  But old and worn as it is it has a strain of passion in it, and Nino threw more fire and voice into the ring of it than ever did famous old Boccarde, when he sang it at the first performance of the opera, thirty and odd years ago.  As he played the chords after the first strophe, the voice from above whispered again: 

“Hush! for Heaven’s sake!” Just that, and something fell at his feet, with a soft little padded sound on the pavement.  He stooped to pick it up, and found a single rose; and at that instant the window closed sharply.  Therefore he kissed the rose and hid it, and presently he strode down the street, finishing his song as he went, but only humming it, for the joy had taken his voice away.  I heard him let himself in and go to bed, and he told me about it in the morning.  That is how I know.

Since the day after the debut Nino had not seen the baroness.  He did not speak of her, and I am sure he wished she were at the very bottom of the Tiber.  But on the morning after the serenade he received a note from her, which was so full of protestations of friendship and so delicately couched that he looked grave, and reflected that it was his duty to be courteous, and to answer such a call as that.  She begged him earnestly to come at one o’clock; she was suffering from headache, she said, and was very weak.  Had Nino loved Hedwig a whit the less he would not have gone.  But he felt himself strong enough to face anything and everything, and therefore he determined to go.

He found her, indeed, with the manner of a person who is ill, but not with the appearance.  She was lying on a huge couch, pushed to the fireside, and there were furs about her.  A striped scarf of rich Eastern silk was round her throat, and she held in her hand a new novel, of which she carelessly cut the pages with a broad-hafted Persian knife.  But there was colour in her dark cheek, and a sort of angry fire in her eyes.  Nino thought the clean steel in her hand looked as though it might be used for something besides cutting leaves, if the fancy took her.

“So at last you have honoured me with a visit, signore,” she said, not desisting from her occupation.  Nino came to her, and she put out her hand.  He touched it, but could not bear to hold it, for it burned him.