Yes; it was Linnet indeed! The natural chances of Will’s profession had thrown them together almost inevitably on the very first night of her appearance in London.

Linnet had looked forward to that night; she had always expected it. During those three long years that had passed since they parted, she had never yet ceased to hope and believe that Andreas would some day take her to England. And if to England, then to London, and Will Deverill. But much had happened meanwhile. She was the self-same Linnet still, in heart and in soul, yet, oh! how greatly changed in externals of every sort. Those three years and a half had made a new woman of her in art, in knowledge, in culture, in intellect. She had left the Tyrol a mere ignorant peasant-girl; she came to London now an educated lady, an accomplished vocalist, a powerful actress, a finished woman of society.

And it was Will Deverill who had first put into her head and heart the idea and the desire of attaining such perfect mastery in her chosen vocation. The capacity, the potentiality, the impulse, the instinct, were all there beforehand; no polish on earth can ever possibly turn a common stone into a gem of the first water: the beauty of colour, the delicacy of grain must be inherent from the outset, only waiting for the art of the skilful lapidary to bring them visibly out and make them publicly manifest. So Linnet had been a lady in fibre from the very first, inheriting the profound Tyrolese capacity for artistic receptiveness and artistic effort; everything that was beautiful in external Nature or human handicraft spoke straight to her heart with an immediate message?—?spoke so clear that Linnet could not choose but listen. Still, it was Will Deverill’s words and Will Deverill’s example that first set her soul upon the true path of development. It was he who had read her Goethe’s Faust on the Küchelberg; it was he who had explained to her the rude Romanesque designs on the portal of the Rittersaal. She had treasured up those first lessons in her inmost heart: they were the key that unlocked for her the front door of culture.

Andreas Hausberger, for his part, could never have taught her so. He had taken her straight from Meran to Verona and Milan. But his soul was bounded by the one idea of music. Even in the first poignant sorrow of that hateful honeymoon, however, Linnet had found time to gaze in wonder at the great amphitheatre, still haunted by the spectral form of the legendary Dietrich; to cry like a child over the narrow tomb where Juliet never lay; to tread with silent awe the vast aisles and solemn crypt of San Zeno Maggiore. At Milan, they loitered long; Andreas set her to work at once under a famous local teacher, and took her often in the evening to hear celebrated singers on the stage of La Scala. Such elements in an artistic education he thoroughly understood, but it never would have occurred to his mind as any part of a soprano’s training to make her examine the Luinis and Borgognones of the Brera, or do homage before the exquisite Botticellis and Peruginos of the Museo Poldi-Pezzoli. To the Wirth of St Valentin such excursions into the sister arts would have seemed mere waste of valuable time, for Andreas regarded music as a branch of trade, and had not that higher wisdom which understands instinctively how every form of art reflects its influence indirectly on the musician’s mind and the musician’s inspiration. That wisdom Linnet possessed, and Andreas, after a few ineffectual remonstrances, let her go her own way and live her own artistic life unchecked to the top of her bent?—?the more so as he perceived she sang best and most vigorously when least thwarted or worried. Moreover, many well-advised friends assured him in private it was desirable for an actress to know as much as possible of costume, of colour, of posture, and of grouping, which could best be learned by studying the works of the great early painters.

So Linnet went her way, undeterred by her husband, and educated herself in general culture at the same time that she received her strict musical training. She knew Raphael’s Sposalizio as intimately after a while as she knew her own chalet; she gazed on the flowing lines of Luini’s frescoes till they grew familiar to her eyes as the Stations of the Cross in the old church at St Valentin. She drank in the cathedral with an endless joy; she loved its innumerable pinnacles, its thousand statues in the marble niches: she admired the gloomy antiquity of mouldering Sant’ Ambrogio, the dim religious aisles of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Amid surroundings like these, her artistic nature expanded by degrees as naturally as a bud opens out into a flower before the summer sunshine. She revelled in the architecture, the pictures, the statuary: Milan stood to the soul of the peasant-singer as a veritable university.

It was the first time, too, that Linnet had ever found herself in a bustling, business-like, modern city. The hurry and scurry were as new as the art to her. The throng of men and women in the crowded streets, the Piazza, brilliant with the flare of glowing lamps, the great glass-roofed gallery where the gilded Lombard youth promenaded by night in twos and threes, or sipped absinthe before the doors of dazzling cafés: all these were quite fresh, and all these were, in their way, too, an element of education. There are many who can see no more in Milan than this: they know it only as the most go-ahead and modernised of Italian cities. Linnet knew better. To her it was the town of Leonardo and his disciples, of the great marble pile whose infinite detail escapes and eludes the most observant eye, of the vast and stately opera house where Otello and Carmen first unfolded their wonders of sight and sound to her ecstatic senses. Wiser in her generation, she accepted it aright as the vestibule and ante-chamber of artistic Italy.

From Milan they went on in due time to Florence. There they stopped less long, for opportunities of learning were not by any means so good as at Milan and Naples. But those few short weeks in the City of the Soul were to Linnet as a dream of some artistic Paradise; they made her half forget, for the moment at least, her lost English lover?—?and her husband’s presence. The Duomo, the Palazzo Vecchio, the Loggia, the Piazza, the old bridge across the Arno, the enchanted market-place; Michael Angelo’s tomb, Giotto’s crusted campanile! What hours she spent, entranced, in the endless halls of the Uffizi and the Pitti; what moments of hushed awe and rapt silence of soul before the pallid Fra Angelicos in the dim cells of San Marco. Ach, Gott, it was beautiful! Linnet gazed with the intense delight of her mountain nature at Raphael’s Madonnas and Andrea’s Holy Families; she stood spellbound before the exquisite young David of the Academia; she wandered with a strange thrill among the marvellous della Robbias and Donatellos of the Bargello. The Tyrolese temperament is before all things artistic. A new sense seemed quickened within Linnet’s soul as she trod those glorious palaces instinct with memories of the Medici and their compeers. A great thirst for knowledge possessed her heart. She read as she had never known how to read before. That Florentine time was as her freshman year in the splendid quadrangles of this Italian Oxford.

Then Rome?—?the Vatican, the Colosseum, the monuments, St Peter’s, the loud organs, the singing boys, the incense, the purple robes and mitres, the great guttering candles! All that could awake in unison every chord of religion and its sister art, in that simple religious artistic nature, was there to gratify her! It was glorious! it was wonderful! So her winter passed away, her first winter with Andreas; she was learning fast, both with eye and with ear, all that Italy and its masters could possibly teach her.

As spring returned, they went northward through Lombardy and the Brenner once more on their way to Munich. Her own Tyrol looked more beautiful than ever as they passed, with its unmelted snows lying thick on the mountains. But, save for a night at Innsbruck, they might not stop there. Yet, even after that short lapse of time in southern cities, oh, how different, how altered little Innsbruck seemed to her! She had thought it before such a grand big town; she thought it now so much shrunken, so old-world, so quaint, so homely. And then, no Will Deverill was there, as before, to brighten it. The mountains gazed down as of old from their precipitous crags upon the nestling town; they were Tyrolese and home-like; and therefore she loved them. But everything had a smaller and meaner air than six months earlier; the queer old High Street was just odd, not magnificent; the Anna S?ule was dwarfed, the Rathhaus had grown smaller. She had only seen Milan, Florence, Rome, meanwhile; but Milan, Florence, Rome, made Innsbruck sink at once to its proper place as a mere provincial capital. While they waited for the Munich t............