"It is wicked!" said the girl; but she sang over again, to the perfect satisfaction of her master, the phrase in F minor.
"It is true," she said, after a pause. "I knew not how to love—I knew not what love was till I learned to sing from you. Every day I learn more what love is; I feel every hour more able to love—I love you more and more for teaching me the art of love."
"Ah, mia cara," said the Maestro, "that was not difficult! You were born with that gift. But it is strange to me, I confess it, how pathetically you sing. It is not in the music—at any rate, not in my music. It is beyond my art and even strange to it, but it touches even me."
And the old man shrugged his shoulders with an odd gesture, in which something like self-contempt struggled with an unaccustomed emotion.
The girl had turned half round, and was looking at him with her bright, yet wistful eyes.
"Never mind, Maestro," she said; "I shall love you always for your music, in spite of your contempt of love, and your miserable, cold——"
And she gave a little shudder. She was forming, indeed, a passionate regard for the old man, solely for the sake of his art.
It was not by any means the first time that such an event had occurred, for unselfish love is much more common than cynical mankind believes.