No sooner were her interviews with Numerian concluded than the promptings of that nature within us, which artifice may warp but can never destroy, lured her into a forgetfulness of all that she had heard and a longing for much that was forbidden.
We live, in this existence, but by the companionship of some sympathy, aspiration, or pursuit, which serves us as our habitual refuge from the tribulations we inherit from the outer world.

The same feeling which led Antonina in her childhood to beg for a flower-garden, in her girlhood induced her to gain possession of a lute.
The passion for music which prompted her visit to Vetranio, which alone saved her affections from pining in the solitude imposed on them, and which occupied her leisure hours in the manner we have already described, was an inheritance of her birth.
Her Spanish mother had sung to her, hour after hour, in her cradle, for the short time during which she was permitted to watch over her child.
The impression thus made on the dawning faculties of the infant, nothing ever effaced.

Though her earliest perception were greeted only by the sight of her father's misery; though the form which his despairing penitence soon assumed doomed her to a life of seclusion and an education of admonition, the passionate attachment to the melody of sound, inspired by her mother's voice--almost imbibed at her mother's breast--lived through all neglect, and survived all opposition.

It found its nourishment in childish recollections, in snatches of street minstrelsy heard through her window, in the passage of the night winds of winter through the groves on the Pincian Mount, and received its rapturous gratification in the first audible sounds from the Roman senator's lute.

How her possession of an instrument, and her skill in playing, were subsequently gained, the reader already knows from Vetranio's narrative at Ravenna.