Gradually the flood tide of emotion began to ebb, and the confusion of loving exclamations and incoherent words gained some order and separated into question and answer.  When Anna learned that the musician had accompanied her sister, she wished to see him, and when he entered, held out both hands, exclaiming: 

“Meister, Meister, in what a condition you find me again!  Henrica, this is the best of men; the only unselfish friend I have found on earth.”

The succeeding hours were full of sorrowful agitation.

Belotti and the old Italian woman often undertook to speak for the invalid, and gradually the image of a basely-destroyed life, that had been worthy of a better fate, appeared before Henrica and Wilhelm.  Fear, anxiety and torturing doubt had from the first saddened Anna’s existence with the unprincipled adventurer and gambler, who had succeeded in beguiling her young, experienced heart.  A short period of intoxication was followed by an unexampled awakening.  She was clasping her first child to her breast, when the unprecedented outrage occurred—­Don Luis demanded that she should move with him into the house of a notorious Marchesa, in whose ill-famed gambling-rooms he had spent his evenings and nights for months.  She indignantly refused, but he coldly and threateningly persisted in having his will.  Then the Hoogstraten blood asserted itself, and without a word of farewell she fled with her child to Lugano.  There the boy was received by his mother’s former waiting-maid, while she herself went to Rome, not as an adventuress, but with a fixed, praiseworthy object in view.  She intended to fully perfect her musical talents in the new schools of Palestrina and Nanini, and thus obtain the ability, by means of her art, to support her child independently of his father and hers.  She risked much, but very definite hopes hovered before her eyes, for a distinguished prelate and lover of music, to whom she had letters of introduction from Brussels, and who knew her voice, had promised that after her return from her musical studies he would give her the place of singing-mistress to a young girl of noble birth, who had been educated in a convent at Milan.  She was under his guardianship, and the worthy man took care to provide Anna, before her departure, with letters to his friends in the eternal city.

Her hasty flight from Rome had been caused by the news, that Don Luis had found and abducted his son.  She could not lose her child, and when she did not find the boy in Milan, followed and at last discovered him in Naples.  There d’Avila restored the child, after she had declared her willingness to make over to him the income she still received from her aunt.  The long journey, so full of excitement and fatigue, exhausted her strength, and she returned to Milan feeble and broken in health.