No matter how I was occupied, whether teaching, or practicing, or reading, or writing, or walking, or talking to other people, I was always conscious of the love of Veronika astir in my heart. Just as through all the vicissitudes of a fugue the subject melody will survive in one form or another and be at no minute altogether silenced, so through all the changes of my busy day the thought of Veronika lingered in my mind. I can not tell how completely the whole aspect of the world had been altered since the night I first saw her standing in the moonlight. It was as if my life up to that moment had been passed beneath gray skies, and suddenly the clouds had dispersed and the sunshine flooded the earth. A myriad things became plain and clear that had been invisible until now, and old things acquired a new significance. My heart welled with tenderness for all living creatures—the overflow of the tenderness it had for her. All my senses, all my capacities for pain and pleasure, were more acute than before. Suddenly music, which had been my art, became my religion: she had glorified it by her devotion. I looked forward to my next visit with her as a benighted traveler looks forward to the glowing window that promises rest and shelter: only in my case the light illuminated my whole pathway and made the progress toward its source a constant delight instead of a perfunctory labor. But this is the common story of a man in love, and stands without telling. Suffice it that before our acquaintance was a month old I had got upon the most intimate terms with Mr. Tikulski and Veronika, spending not only every Wednesday evening at their house but also each Sunday afternoon, and accompanying her to Hoboken as regularly as she had to go. Never was there a prouder man than I at those junctures when, with her hand pressed tightly under my arm, I felt that she was trusting herself entirely to my charge and that I was answerable for her safety and well-being. The Hoboken ferry-boats became to my thinking vastly more interesting than the most romantic of Venetian gondolas; and to this day I can not sniff the peculiar stuffy odor that always pervades a ferry-boat cabin without being transported back across the years to that happy, happy time. I actually blessed the necessity that forced her to journey so far for her livelihood; and it was with an emphatic pang that I listened to the plans which she and Tikulski were prone to discuss whereby she was shortly to get an engagement nearer home: though the sight of her pale, tired cheek reproached me the moment after. On her side she made no concealment of a most cordial regard for me. Her face always lighted up at my arrival; she was always eager to share her ideas with me and to call forth my opinion of her work, appearing pleased by my praise and impressed by my criticism. She set me an admirable example of frankness. She would say precisely what she thought of my renditions, sparing not their blemishes and indicating how an effective point might be improved.