She spread her hands to express the flower magnified.

“Oh! what silly talk,” said her mother:  “it does turn your head, this dress does!”

“I wish it would give me my voice, mother.  My father has no hope.  I wish he would send me news to make me happy about him; or come and run his finger up the strings for hours, as he used to.  I have fancied I heard him at times, and I had a longing to follow the notes, and felt sure of my semi-tones.  He won’t see me!  Mother! he would think something of me if he saw me now!”

Her mother’s lamentations reached that vocal pitch at last which Emilia could not endure, and the little lady was despatched to her home under charge of a servant.

Emilia feasted on the looking-glass when alone.  Had Merthyr, in restoring her to health, given her an overdose of the poison?

“Countess Branciani made the Austrian Governor her slave,” she uttered, planting one foot upon a stool to lend herself height.  “He told her who were suspected, and who would be imprisoned, and gave her all the State secrets.  Beauty can do more than music.  I wonder whether Merthyr loved her?  He loves me!”

Emilia was smitten with a fear that he would speak of it when she next saw him.  “Oh!  I hope he will be just the same as he has been,” she sighed; and with much melancholy shook her head at her fair reflection, and began to undress.  It had not struck her with surprise that two men should be loving her, until, standing away from the purple folds, she seemed to grow smaller and smaller, as a fire-log robbed of its flame, and felt insufficient and weak.  This was a new sensation.  She depended no more on her own vital sincerity.  It was in her nature, doubtless, to crave constantly for approval, but in the service of personal beauty instead of divine Art, she found herself utterly unwound without it:  victim of a sense of most uncomfortable hollowness.  She was glad to extinguish the candle and be covered up dark in the circle of her warmth.  Then her young blood sang to her again.

An hour before breakfast every morning she read with Merthyr.  Now, this morning how was she to appear to him?  There would be no reading, of course.  How could he think of teaching one to whom he trembled.  Emilia trusted that she might see no change in him, and, above all, that he would not speak of his love for her.  Nevertheless, she put on her robe of conquest, having first rejected with distaste a plainer garb.  She went down the stairs slowly.  Merthyr was in the library awaiting her.  “You are late,” he said, eyeing the dress as a thing apart from her, and remarking that it was hardly suited for morning wear.  “Yellow, if you must have a strong colour, and you wouldn’t exhibit the schwartz-gelb of the Tedeschi willingly.  But now!”

This was the signal for the reading to commence.