his violin. He tossed his hair into artistic disorder with
the violent intensity of feeling as he played, and his fingers,
strained out till the tendons between them were stretched like the
strings upon which they moved, felt for the harmonics--shrill notes
that pierced through the sounds of all the other instruments.

In the midst of the rattling of plates, the coming and going, the
buzz of conversation, these two men chatted good-naturedly over
their meal. At its conclusion, they ordered coffee, cigars and
liqueurs, and leant back comfortably in their chairs. Hundreds of
others there, were doing precisely the same as they--thousands of
others in all the restaurants in London. There was nothing remarkable
about their faces, their dress or their manner until one of them
suddenly leant forward across the table, and his expression, from
genial amusement, leapt in sudden changes from the amazement of
surprise to the fierceness of contempt and anger. Some exclamation
in the force of the moment probably left his lips, for a woman at
a table near by turned in her chair and gazed at them with unconcealed
curiosity. She kept strained in that position as he brought down his
fist on the table. She could see his fingers gripping the cloth. Then
the other man put out his hand with a gesture of restraint.

From that they talked on excitedly--one or them driving his questions
to the tardy replies of the other. Here and there in their speech
the name of God ripped out, and the waiter, placing the card back
on one of the empty tables, stood more alert, listening.

Their cigars burnt low, their coffee was drained; yet still they
continued, voices pitched now on a lower key, but none the less
intense, none the less spurred with vital interest. The man
apparently most concerned had ceased from the urging of his questions.
His elbows were resting on the table, his face was in his hands. Now
and again he nodded in understanding, now and again he ejaculated
some remark, pressing his companion to the full measure of what he
had to say. Obviously it was a story--the relation of some incident,
reluctantly dragged from the one by the persistent, unyielding
demands of the other.

The woman at the near table put up her hand to her ear, shutting off
the conversation of those with her, striving to catch a word here
and there in the endeavour to piece it together. It was about some
woman. She--was continually being alluded to. She--had done this-