* * * * * *
When Lensky presented himself again, the next day, in the Palazzo Morsini, and, indeed, this time to arrange the purchase of the wonderful violin, the princess called out gayly to him:
"The violins are no longer to be had. I have bought all three. I gave all my savings for them. If you wish to play on them, you must come here. But you may come as often as you wish!"
"For how long?" asked he, with a peculiar tremble in his voice.
She turned away her head. After awhile she said, apparently irrelevantly, with her gay, ingenuous smile, that still never quite banished the sadness from her pale face: "Do you know that we are really as poor as church mice? It is comical. Mamma consoles herself with the thought that I will make a good match. If she should be mistaken, what a tragedy!"
She laughed merrily. What did she mean by that?
* * * * * *
He came oftener and oftener to the old palace in the Via Giulia; came every day, indeed.
Formerly intercourse with women of rank had always formed only a short parenthesis in his otherwise dissolute life. Now the couple of hours, or sometimes they were only minutes, which he daily passed with the Assanows were the key-note of all the rest of his existence. How happy he felt with them!
If elsewhere the great society ladies had raved over the artist Lensky to an immoderate extent, they had quite ignored the man. But with the Assanows it was different, or at least it seemed so. His fame was not put forward from morning to night. There were days in which his violin-playing was not even mentioned. The artist stopped in the background, and in association with Natalie and her mother he was no star, no lion, only a very wise, peculiar, sympathetic man, who pleased quite aside from his artistic gifts. Besides, with them he appeared differently than with any one else in the world.