“The rest are not worth mentioning, and Your Excellency will find them out,” he concluded, seeing that on the entrance of the musician’s wife the Count had ceased to listen to him.

On seeing Andrea here, Signora Marianna started visibly and a bright flush tinged her cheeks.

“Here he is!” said Giardini, in an undertone, clutching the Count’s arm and nodding to a tall man.  “How pale and grave he is poor man!  His hobby has not trotted to his mind to-day, I fancy.”

Andrea’s prepossession for Marianna was crossed by the captivating charm which Gambara could not fail to exert over every genuine artist.  The composer was now forty; but although his high brow was bald and lined with a few parallel, but not deep, wrinkles; in spite, too, of hollow temples where the blue veins showed through the smooth, transparent skin, and of the deep sockets in which his black eyes were sunk, with their large lids and light lashes, the lower part of his face made him still look young, so calm was its outline, so soft the modeling.  It could be seen at a glance that in this man passion had been curbed to the advantage of the intellect; that the brain alone had grown old in some great struggle.

Andrea shot a swift look at Marianna, who was watching him.  And he noted the beautiful Italian head, the exquisite proportion and rich coloring that revealed one of those organizations in which every human power is harmoniously balanced, he sounded the gulf that divided this couple, brought together by fate.  Well content with the promise he inferred from this dissimilarity between the husband and wife, he made no attempt to control a liking which ought to have raised a barrier between the fair Marianna and himself.  He was already conscious of feeling a sort of respectful pity for this man, whose only joy she was, as he understood the dignified and serene acceptance of ill fortune that was expressed in Gambara’s mild and melancholy gaze.

After expecting to see one of the grotesque figures so often set before us by German novelists and writers of libretti, he beheld a simple, unpretentious man, whose manners and demeanor were in nothing strange and did not lack dignity.  Without the faintest trace of luxury, his dress was more decent than might have been expected from his extreme poverty, and his linen bore witness to the tender care which watched over every detail of his existence.  Andrea looked at Marianna with moistened eyes; and she did not color, but half smiled, in a way that betrayed, perhaps, some pride at this speechless homage.  The Count, too thoroughly fascinated to miss the smallest indication of complaisance, fancied that she must love him, since she understood him so well.

From this moment he set himself to conquer the husband rather than the wife, turning all his batteries against the poor Gambara, who quite guilelessly went on eating Signor Giardini’s bocconi, without thinking of their flavor.