At that critical moment Viola, the Siren queen, emerged for the first time from her ocean cave.

As she came forward to the lamps, the novelty of her situation, the chilling apathy of the audience,--which even the sight of so singular a beauty did not at the first arouse,--the whispers of the malignant singers on the stage, the glare of the lights, and more--far more than the rest--that recent hiss, which had reached her in her concealment, all froze up her faculties and suspended her voice.

And, instead of the grand invocation into which she ought rapidly to have burst, the regal Siren, retransformed into the trembling girl, stood pale and mute before the stern, cold array of those countless eyes.
At that instant, and when consciousness itself seemed about to fail her, as she turned a timid beseeching glance around the still multitude, she perceived, in a box near the stage, a countenance which at once, and like magic, produced on her mind an effect never to be analysed nor forgotten.

It was one that awakened an indistinct, haunting reminiscence, as if she had seen it in those day-dreams she had been so wont from infancy to indulge.

She could not withdraw her gaze from that face, and as she gazed, the awe and coldness that had before seized her, vanished like a mist from before the sun.
In the dark splendour of the eyes that met her own there was indeed so much of gentle encouragement, of benign and compassionate admiration,--so much that warmed, and animated, and nerved,--that any one, actor or orator, who has ever observed the effect that a single earnest and kindly look in the crowd that is to be addressed and won, will produce upon his mind, may readily account for the sudden and inspiriting influence which the eye and smile of the stranger exercised on the debutante.
And while yet she gazed, and the glow returned to her heart, the stranger half rose, as if to recall the audience to a sense of the courtesy due to one so fair and young; and the instant his voice gave the signal, the audience followed it by a burst of generous applause.
For this stranger himself was a marked personage, and his recent arrival at Naples had divided with the new opera the gossip of the city.