“Ah,” he cried suddenly, “music is better than love, for it lasts; let us make music.”  He dropped his hat and stick and seized the instrument.  In an instant it was tuned and he began to perform the most extraordinary feats of agility with his fingers that I ever beheld.  Some of it was very beautiful, and some of it very sad and wild, but I understood Nino’s enthusiasm.  I could have listened to the old guitar in his hands for hours together,—­I, who care little for music; and I watched his face.  He stalked about the room with the thing in his hands, in a sort of wild frenzy of execution.  His features grew ashy pale, and his smooth white hair stood out wildly from his head.  He looked, then, more than a hundred years old, and there was a sadness and a horror about him that would have made the stones cry aloud for pity.  I could not believe he was the same man.  At last he was tired, and stopped.

“You are a great artist, baron,” I said.  “Your music seems to affect you much.”

“Ah, yes, it makes me feel like other men for the time,” said he, in a low voice.  “Did you know that Paganini always practised on the guitar?  It is true.  Well, I will find out about the Liras for you in a day or two, before I leave Rome again.”

I thanked him and he took his leave.

CHAPTER XII

Benoni had made an impression on me that nothing could efface.  His tall thin figure and bright eyes got into my dreams and haunted me, so that I thought my nerves were affected.  For several days I could think of nothing else, and at last had myself bled, and took some cooling barley-water, and gave up eating salad at night, but without any perceptible effect.

Nino wrote often, and seemed very much excited about the disappearance of the contessina, but what could I do?  I asked everyone I knew, and nobody had heard of them, so that at last I quite gave it over, and wrote to tell him so.  A week passed, then a fortnight, and I had heard nothing from Benoni.  Nino wrote again, enclosing a letter addressed to the Contessina di Lira, which he implored me to convey to her, if I loved him.  He said he was certain that she had never left Italy.  Some instinct seemed to tell him so, and she was evidently in neither London nor Paris, for he had made every inquiry, and had even been to the police about it.  Two days after this, Benoni came.  He looked exactly as he did the first time I saw him.

“I have news,” he said, briefly, and sat down in the arm-chair, striking the dust from his boot with his little cane.

“News of the Graf?” I inquired.

“Yes.  I have found out something.  They never left Italy at all, it seems.  I am rather mystified, and I hate mystification.  The old man is a fool; all old men are fools, excepting myself.  Will you smoke?  No?  Allow me, then.  It is a modern invention, but a very good one.”  He lit a cigarette.  “I wish your Liras were in Tophet,” he continued, presently.  “How can people have the bad taste to hide?  It only makes ingenious persons the more determined to find them.”  He seemed talkative, and as I was so sad and lonely I encouraged him by a little stimulus of doubt.  I wish I had doubted him sooner, and differently.