Excerpt from Lady Merton, Vol. 2: A Tale of the Eternal City<br><br>Uring these Christmas holidays, in considera tion of his passionate love of music, Mary, after obtaining Sir Henry's approval, took Freddy with them to the opera, and she was more interested in watching the child than in observing what was going forward on the stage. He sat enraptured, his eyes fixed on the scene, absorbed, intense, motionless. It seemed almost as if his soul were ravished from his body, so still was this. Only the eyes told that his spirit was yet inside its habitation, pressing close behind them, and looking out with such craving, consuming, insatiable desire. For him what 'he saw on the stage was to all intents and purposes real a new, wonderfully beautiful world, into which he had just been born, whose heavenly sounds and colours and forms and rhythm, all worked together harmoniously to intensify the supernatural life - life? Oh, yes, that was the actual life.<br><br>But the next morning, when she went to Freddy's room to see how he was, Lady Merton bitterly regretted having given the child so much pleasure.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.