I see very well that unless I hurry myself I shall never reach the most important part of this story, which is after all the only part worth telling.  I am sure I do not know how I can ever tell it so quickly, but I will do my best, and you must have a little patience; for though I am not old, I am not young, and Nino’s departure for Paris was a great shock to me, so that I do not like to remember it, and the very thought of it sickens me.  If you have ever had any education, you must have seen an experiment in which a mouse is put in a glass jar, and all the air is drawn away with a pump, so that the poor little beast languishes and rolls pitifully on its side, gasping and wheezing with its tiny lungs for the least whiff of air.  That is just how I felt when Nino went away.  It seemed as though I could not breathe in the house or in the streets, and the little rooms at home were so quiet that one might hear a pin fall, and the cat purring through the closed doors.  Nino left at the beginning of the last ten days of Carnival, when the opera closed, so that it was soon Lent; and everything is quieter then.

But before he left us there was noise enough and bustle of preparation, and I did not think I should miss him; for he, always was making music, or walking about, or doing something to disturb me just at the very moment when I was most busy with my books.  Mariuccia, indeed, would ask me from time to time what I should do when Nino was gone, as if she could foretell what I was to feel.  I suppose she knew I was used to him, after fourteen years of it, and would be inclined to black humours for want of his voice.  But she could not know just what Nino is to me, nor how I look on him as my own boy.  These peasants are quick-witted and foolish; they guess a great many things better than I could, and then reason on them like idiots.

Nino himself was glad to go.  I could see his face grow brighter as the time approached; and though he appeared to be more successful than ever in his singing, I am sure that he cared nothing for the applause he got, and thought only of singing as well as he could for the love of it.  But when it came to the parting we were left alone.

“Messer Cornelio,” he said, looking at me affectionately, “I have something to say to you to-night before I go away.”

“Speak, then, my dear boy,” I answered, “for no one hears us.”

“You have been very good to me.  A father could not have loved me better, and such a father as I had could not have done a thousandth part what you have done for me.  I am going out into the world for a time, but my home is here,—­or rather, where my home is will always be yours.  You have been my father, and I will be your son; and it is time you should give up your professorship.  No, not that you are at all old; I do not mean that.”

“No, indeed,” said I, “I should think not.”

“It would be much more proper if you retired into an elegant leisure, so that you might write as many books as you desire without wearing yourself out in teaching those students every day.  Would you not like to go back to Serveti?”