ntreat you. And behave
yourself, too. Take your arm away." She tried to remove it. "I have
told you already, I can't have you here to-day. I'm expecting a
visitor."

He laid his head on her shoulder. "Let him come. Let the whole world
come. I don't budge. I am happy here."

"You must go and be happy elsewhere," said Madeleine more decisively
than she had yet spoken. "And before she comes, too."

"She? What she?"

"Never mind."

"For that very reason, Mada."

She whispered a word in his ear. He looked at her, incredulously at
first, then whimsically, with a sham dismay; and then, as if Maurice
had only just taken shape for him, he turned and looked at him also,
and from him to Madeleine, and back to him, finally bursting afresh
into a roar of laughter. Madeleine laid her hand over his mouth. "Take
him away, do," she said to Avery Hill--"as a favour to me."

"Yes, when I have finished my cigarette," said the girl without
stirring.

Unsettled all the same, it would seem, by what he had heard, Krafft
rose and shuffled about the room, with his hands in his pockets.
Approaching Maurice, he even stood for a moment and contemplated him,
with a kind of mock gravity. Maurice acted as if he did not see Krafft;
long since, he had taken up a magazine, and, half hidden in a chair
between window and writing-table, pretended to bury himself in its
contents. But he heard very plainly all that passed, and, at the effect
produced on Krafft by the name of the expected visitor, his hands
trembled with anger. If the fellow had stood looking at him for another
second, he would have got up and knocked him down. But Krafft turned
nonchalantly to the piano, where his attention was caught by a song
that was standing on the rack. He chuckled, and set about making
merciless fun of the music--the composer was an elderly
singing-teacher, of local fame. Madeleine grew angry, and tried to take
it from him.

"Hold your tongue, Heinz! If your own songs were more like this, they
would have a better chance of success. Now be quiet! I won't hear
another word. Herr Wendling is a very good friend of mine."

"A friend! Heavens! She says friend as if it were an excuse for
him.--Mada, let your friend cease making music if he hopes for
salvation. Let him buy a broom and sweep the streets--let him----"

"You are disgusting!"

She had got the music from him, but he was already at the piano,
parodying, from memory, the conventional accompaniment and