Faustina made two or three ineffectual attempts to speak before she could find her voice. She burst into tears.
"He is cruel! cruel!" she said. "He does not love me. He will not have me any longer. He throws me away."
"Poor child!" said the Prince, "you will not be deserted. I am your friend; we are all your friends. The Maestro even will come back to you. He is cross and angry. When he finds how lost he is without you and your lovely voice, he will come back to you; you and he will carry all before you again."
"Speak to him, Highness!" cried the girl passionately. "You are kind and good to all—kinder than any one to me. Speak to him! do not let him go without me! He cannot live without his music, and no one surely can know his music so well as I, whom he has taught!"
She looked so indescribably attractive in her tears and her distress that the Prince wondered at the sight. "Let her go, indeed!"
"Tina," he said very kindly, "I fear that can hardly be. The Maestro is only going for a time. There is, in fact, no need that he should go at all. It is his own wish, his own wish, Tina. He is too old to make his way among strangers, and will soon come back. But you we cannot spare. You are too much a favourite with us all. We are too much accustomed to you: every one would miss you—the Princess and all; you must stay with us."
"I cannot stay," said the girl, looking earnestly and beseechingly at the Prince. "I want to go with him."
The Prince hesitated for a moment. In an instantaneous flash of thought the two paths lay open before him, plain and clear to be seen. Carricchio's warning struck him again with renewed force. The more terrible presage of Mark's death cast itself, ghostlike, before his steps. He could plead no excuse of self-deception: he saw the beauty and the danger of the way which lay before him on either hand. He hesitated for a moment, then he deliberately chose the lower path.
"Tina," he said, "I cannot spare you; you must not go. You are mine—I love you; you belong to me;" and he stepped forward, as if to take her in his arms.
The girl sprang to her feet. She drew herself up to her full height, and her splendid eyes, expanded to their full orbit, flashed upon the Prince with a look of astonishment and reproach. With the entire power of her trained voice, which, magnificent as it was, could still but imperfectly render the reality of remonstrance and pathetic regret, she uttered but one word—"Prince!"