“I am very glad,” said Zara, “I know you are a musician, and I think there can be no bitterer fate than for one belonging to your art to be incapacitated from performance of work by some physical obstacle.  Poor grand old Beethoven!  Can anything be more pitiful to think of than his deafness?  Yet how splendidly he bore up against it!  And Chopin, too—­so delicate in health that he was too often morbid even in his music.  Strength is needed to accomplish great things—­the double strength of body and soul.”

“Are you, too, a musician?” I inquired.

“No.  I love music passionately, and I play a little on the organ in our private chapel; but I follow a different art altogether.  I am a mere imitator of noble form—­I am a sculptress.”

“You?” I said in some wonder, looking at the very small, beautifully formed white hand that lay passively on the edge of the couch beside me.  “You make statues in marble like Michael Angelo?”

“Like Angelo?” murmured Zara; and she lowered her brilliant eyes with a reverential gravity.  “No one in these modern days can approach the immortal splendour of that great master.  He must have known heroes and talked with gods to be able to hew out of the rocks such perfection of shape and attitude as his ‘David.’  Alas! my strength of brain and hand is mere child’s play compared to what has been done in sculpture, and what will yet be done; still, I love the work for its own sake, and I am always trying to render a resemblance of—­”

Here she broke off abruptly, and a deep blush suffused her cheeks.  Then, looking up suddenly, she took my hand impulsively, and pressed it.

“Be my friend,” she said, with a caressing inflection in her rich voice, “I have no friends of my own sex, and I wish to love you.  My brother has always had so much distrust of the companionship of women for me.  You know his theories; and he has always asserted that the sphere of thought in which I have lived all my life is so widely apart from those in which other women exist—­that nothing but unhappiness for me could come out of associating us together.  When he told me yesterday that you were coming to see me to-day, I knew he must have discovered something in your nature that was not antipathetic to mine; otherwise he would not have brought you to me.  Do you think you can like me?—­perhaps love me after a little while?”

It would have been a cold heart indeed that would not have responded to such a speech as this, uttered with the pleading prettiness of a loving child.  Besides, I had warmed to her from the first moment I had touched her hand; and I was overjoyed to think that she was willing to elect me as a friend.  I therefore replied to her words by putting my arm affectionately round her waist and kissing her.  My beautiful, tender Zara!  How innocently happy she seemed to be thus embraced! and how gently her fragrant lips met mine in that sisterly caress!  She leaned her dark head for a moment on my shoulder, and the mysterious jewel on her breast flashed into a weird red hue like the light of a stormy sunset.