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bitterly I regretted the way in which I had acted towards the young man whom—well, it was useless to mince matters any longer, or to give myself the lie—I still loved. Yes, loved more than ever—loved to distraction.
"On the morrow, I looked for all the papers in which his name was mentioned, and I found—it may perhaps be vanity on my part to think so—that from the very day I had ceased to attend his concerts, he had been playing wretchedly, until at last his critics, once so lenient, had all joined against him, endeavouring to bring him to a better sense of the duty he owed to his art, to the public, and to himself.
"About a week afterwards, I again went to hear him play.
"As he came in, I was surprised to see the change wrought in him in that short space of time; he was not only careworn and dejected, but pale, thin, and sickly-looking. He seemed, in fact, to have grown ten years older in those few days. There was in him that alteration which my mother had noticed in me on her return from Italy; but she, of course, had attributed it to the
