remaining bit of toast and marmalade had vanished from his
plate, and as he never allowed himself more than his usual number of
slices, he carefully brushed the crumbs from his coat, and pushing back
his chair, rose from the table. The movement, slight as it was, served
to dispel his passing dejection, and as he gathered up his papers and
passed into the adjoining sitting-room, he smiled at Wilkins with such
genial brightness that the man was almost deluded into attributing the
changed atmosphere to his own personal attentions instead of to the
agreeable sensation following upon digestion. When he left the
dining-room Kemper was already humming a little Italian air, and it was
not until he was seated, with his cigar, in an easy chair upon his
hearthrug, that he suddenly recognised the music as a favourite aria of
Madame Alta's. He had heard her sing it a hundred times, and he recalled
now that she had a trick of throwing her head back as the notes issued
from her round, white throat, until her beautiful, though coarsened
face, was seen in an admirable foreshortening, while her eyes were
shadowed by her drooping lids, which were faintly tinted to look like
rose-leaves. With the memory his expression was again overcast. Then a
pleased smile chased the heaviness from his eyes, for he remembered
suddenly that he held a firm grip on the promising Chericoke Valley
Central stock. He lighted his cigar, tossed the match into the empty
fireplace, and pushing the papers from his knees, relapsed for twenty
minutes into an agreeable vacancy of mind.

The room in which he sat was essentially a man's room, furnished for
comfort rather than for beauty, and one saw in it an unconscious
striving after large effects, a disdain of useless bric-a-brac as of
small decorations. On the mantel the solitary ornament was an exquisite
bronze figure of a wrestler at the triumphant instant when he subdues
his opponent, a spirited and virile study of the nude male figure, and
just above it hung a portrait in oils of Madame Alta, painted in a large
black hat with a falling feather which shadowed the golden aureole of
her hair. Kemper seldom looked at the picture, and when he did so it was
with the casual glance he bestowed upon a piece of household furniture;
his emotion had been so bound up with the concrete fact of a fleshly
presence that in the continued absence of the prima donna he had found
it difficult even to realise the condition of her uncha