and extracted the bank-note. She smoothed it out and laughed aloud.

"Oh, if only he had taken me for a ride in the taxicab!" She bubbled again
with merriment.

Suddenly she sprang up, as if inspired, and dashed into another room, a
study. She came back with pen and ink, and with a celerity that came of
long practise, drew five straight lines across the faint violet face of
the bank-note. Within these lines she made little dots at the top and
bottom of stubby perpendicular strokes, and strange interlineal
hieroglyphics, and sweeping curves, all of which would have puzzled an
Egyptologist if he were unused to the ways of musicians. Carefully she
dried the composition, and then put the note away. Some day she would
confound him by returning it.

A little later her fingers were moving softly over the piano keys;
melodies in minor, sad and haunting and elusive, melodies that had never
been put on paper and would always be her own: in them she might leap from
comedy to tragedy, from laughter to tears, and only she would know. The
midnight adventure was forgotten, and the hero of it, too. With her eyes
closed and her lithe body swaying gently, she let the old weary pain in
her heart take hold again.

CHAPTER III

THE BEAUTIFUL TIGRESS

Flora Desimone had been born in a Calabrian peasant's hut, and she had
rolled in the dust outside, yelling vigorously at all times. Specialists
declare that the reason for all great singers coming from lowly origin is
found in this early development of the muscles of the throat. Parents of
means employ nurses or sedatives to suppress or at least to smother these
infantile protests against being thrust inconsiderately into the turmoil
of human beings. Flora yelled or slept, as the case might be; her parents
were equally indifferent. They were too busily concerned with the getting
of bread and wine. Moreover, Flora was one among many. The gods are always
playing with the Calabrian peninsula, heaving it up here or throwing it
down there: _il terremoto_, the earthquake, the terror. Here nature
tinkers vicariously with souls; and she seldom has time to complete her
work. Constant communion with death makes for callosity of feeling; and
the Calabrians and the Sicilians are the cruellest among the civilized
peoples. Flora was ruthless.

She lived amazingly well in the premier of an apartment-hotel in the
Champs-Elysees. In England and America she had amassed a fortune. Given
the warm