he became aware of a faint, familiar, and yet almost forgotten perfume,
which entered his nostrils from the apartment before which he stood. The
perfume, distant as it was, revived in him instantly, with that curious
association between odours and visual memory, a recollection which might
otherwise have slumbered for years in his brain--and though he had not
thought of Jennie Alta once during the summer and autumn months, there
rose immediately before him now the memory of her dressing table with
the silver box in which she kept some rare highly scented powder. Every
incident of his acquaintance with her thronged in a disordered series
through his brain; and it was with an odd presentiment of what awaited
him, that he entered his sitting room and found her occupying a chair
before his fireside. When she sprang up and faced him in her coarsened
beauty, it seemed the most natural thing in the world that he should
accept the fact of her presence with merely an ironic protest.

"So you've turned up again," he remarked, as he held out his hand with a
smile, "I was led to believe that the last parting would be final."

"Oh, it was," she answered lightly, "but there's an end even to
finality, you know."

The flute-like soprano of her voice fell pleasantly upon his ears, and
as he looked into her face he told himself that it was marvellous how
well she had managed to preserve an effect of youthfulness. Under the
flaring wings in her hat her eyes were still clear and large and heavy
lidded, her thin red lips still held the shape of their sensual curve. A
white fur boa was thrown carelessly about her neck, and he remembered
that underneath it, encircling her short throat there was the soft
crease of flesh which the ancient poets had named "the necklace of
Venus."

"Well, I can but accept this visit as a compliment, I suppose," he
observed with amiable indifference, "it means--doesn't it? that you won
your fight about the opera contract?"

An expression of anger--of the uncontrolled, majestic anger of a
handsome animal, awoke in her face, and she pulled off her long white
glove as if seeking to free herself from some restraint of custom. Her
hand, he noticed, with a keen eye for such feminine details, was large,
roughly shaped and over fleshy about the wrist.

"I'd starve before I'd sing again by that old contract," she responded.
"No, it's not opera--Parker refused to pay me what I asked and I held
out to the end--I shall