sing in concert for the first time, and I shan't
be happy until I have every seat in the opera house left empty."

He laughed with an acute enjoyment of her repressed violence. "Oh,
you're welcome to mine," he returned good-humouredly, "but what is the
day of your great first battle?"

"Not until December. I'm going West and South before I sing in New
York."

"Then you aren't here for much of a stay, after all?"

She shook her head and the orange coloured wings in her hat waved to and
fro.

"Only a few days at a time. After Christmas I sail back again. In
February I'm engaged for Monte Carlo."

Then her expression underwent a curious change--as if personality,
colour, passion pulsed into her half averted face--and the hard
professional tones in which she had spoken were softened as if by an
awakening memory.

"So you still keep my portrait, I see," she observed, lifting her eyes
to the picture above the mantel, "you don't hate me, then, so bitterly
as I thought."

He shrugged his shoulders with the gesture he had acquired abroad.

"I did take it down, but it left a smudge on the wall, so I had to put
it back again."

"Then you sometimes think of me?" she enquired, with curiosity.

"Not when I can help it," he retorted, laughing.

His ironic pleasantry stung her into an irritation which showed plainly
in her face; and she appeared, for the first time, to bend her
intelligence toward some definite achievement.

"And is that always easy?" she asked, in a tone of mere flippant banter.

A petty impulse of revenge lent sharpness to his voice. "Easier than you
think," he responded coolly.

"Well, I suppose, I'll have to take the punishment," she answered, as
lightly as before; and then turning to the mantelpiece again, she raised
her glance to the portrait. "I never liked it," she commented frankly,
"he's got me in an unnatural position--I never stood like that in my
life--and there's an open smirk about the mouth."

He saw her face in the admirable pose which he remembered--the chin held
slightly forward, the cheek rounded upward, the eyes uplifted--and for
an instant he waited, half hoping that her voice of wine and honey would
roll from between her lips. But she was frugal of her notes, he recalled
the instant afterward.

"I've always considered it a pretty fair likeness," he remarked.

"Then you've always considered me pretty hideous," she flashed back in
annoyance.

As she swung round upon the he