And then the three knocks, which announced the raising of the curtain, were heard; and the Marchese again murmuring a request to be forgiven, as he kissed her hand, hurried away to take his place in his box.

The house was already nearly full, for the occasion was a notable one; and the opera was new to Ravenna; and everybody wished to hear every note of it.  The Marchese Ludovico was not, however, in the Castelmare box, when his uncle reached it, but he came in a minute afterwards.  He had been up to the upper tier of boxes to say a word to Paolina and her old friend, who were in the box he had provided for them, which was on the opposite side of the house to the Castelmare box; and exactly over that in the “piano nobile” in which were the Marchesa Anna Lanfredi, and her niece the Contessa Violante.

There was a little noise in the house of people not yet seated during the opening chorus of villagers; but when the prima donna came on the stage as Amina, after the prolonged and repeated rounds of applause, which greeted her appearance, had subsided, a pin’s fall might have been heard in the theatre.

The Marchese Ludovico had joined cordially and boisterously, and the Marchese Lamberto more moderately, in the applause which had saluted the entrance of the Diva; and after that the latter had placed himself in the corner of the box, with his back to the audience, and his face towards the stage, and with an opera-glass at his eyes, he sat perfectly still, feeding his passion with every glance, every change of feature, and every movement of the woman who had enthralled him.

Then came the famous song of Amina, the happy village-bride about to be married on the morrow to her lover—­the tenor of course.  The Diva sang it admirably, and acted it equally well.  The purest girlish innocence was expressed in every trait of her features and manifested itself in every gesture and every movement.  The perfect, trusting, happy love of a fresh and innocent heart could have had no better representative.

The recitative, “Care compagne,” etc, addressed to the assembled villagers, fell from her lips with a purity of enunciation that made each syllable seem like a note from a silver bell.  And then the air, “Come per me sereno,” held the house entranced till the final note of it.  And then burst forth such a frantic shout of applause and delight as can be heard only in an Italian theatre.

Ludovico leant far out of the stage-box in which he sat, and joined vociferously in the plaudits with both hand and voice.  But the Marchese remained quiet in his corner, with his face half-shaded by his hand, conscious as he was that the expression of it might need hiding from the others in the box.  He need not have heeded them; for their attention was too exclusively occupied with the stage for them to expend any of it on him.  Had it been otherwise his hand, covering the lower half of his face, would not have sufficed to conceal his emotion.