isting
on--with an anxious minuteness! Nora could hardly keep her face straight
in the distance--they were so like a pair of crooning housewives. Then
he began on his French visit, sitting sideways on his chair, his elbow
on the back of it, and his hand thrust into his curly mass of
hair--handsomer, thought Nora, than ever. And there was Connie
listening spell-bound in a low chair opposite, her delicate pale profile
distinct against the dark panelling of the room, her eyes fixed on him.
Nora's perplexed eyes travelled from one to the other.

As to the story of the Orpheus and its inventor, both girls hung upon
it. Falloden had tracked Auguste Chaumart to his garret in Montmartre,
and had found in him one of those marvellous French workmen, inheritors
of the finest technical tradition in the world, who are the true sons of
the men who built and furnished and carved Versailles, and thereby
revolutionised the minor arts of Europe. A small pinched fellow!--with a
sickly wife and children sharing his tiny workshop, and a brain teeming
with inventions, of which the electric piano, forerunner of the
Welte-Mignons of later days, was but the chief among many. He had spent
a fortune upon it, could get no capitalist to believe in it, and no firm
to take it up. Then Falloden's astonishing letter and offer of funds,
based on Radowitz's report--itself the echo of a couple of letters from
Paris--had encouraged the starving dreamer to go on.

Falloden reproduced the scene, as described to him by the chief actor in
it, when the inventor announced to his family that the thing was
accomplished, the mechanism perfect, and how that very night they should
hear Chopin's great Fantasia, Op. 49, played by its invisible hands.

The moment came. Wife and children gathered, breathless. Chaumart turned
on the current, released the machinery.

"_Ecoutez, mes enfants! Ecoutez, Henriette_!"

They listened--with ears, with eyes, with every faculty strained to its
utmost. And nothing happened!--positively nothing--beyond a few wheezing
or creaking sounds. The haggard inventor in despair chased everybody out
of the room, and sat looking at the thing, wondering whether to smash
it, or kill himself. Then an idea struck him. In feverish haste he took
the whole mechanism to pieces again, sitting up all night. And as the
morning sun rose, he discovered in the very heart of the creature, to
which by now he attributed an uncanny and independent life, the mo