arriage Cressida had only twenty-five
performances at the Metropolitan, and she was singing out of town a great
deal. Her husband did not bestir himself to accompany her, but he
attended, very faithfully, to her correspondence and to her business at
home. He had no ambitious schemes to increase her fortune, and he carried
out her directions exactly. Nevertheless, Cressida faced her concert
tours somewhat grimly, and she seldom talked now about their plans for
the future.

The crisis in this growing estrangement came about by accident,--one of
those chance occurrences that affect our lives more than years of ordered
effort,--and it came in an inverted form of a situation old to comedy.
Cressida had been on the road for several weeks; singing in Minneapolis,
Cleveland, St. Paul, then up into Canada and back to Boston. From Boston
she was to go directly to Chicago, coming down on the five o'clock train
and taking the eleven, over the Lake Shore, for the West. By her schedule
she would have time to change cars comfortably at the Grand Central
station.

On the journey down from Boston she was seized with a great desire to see
Blasius. She decided, against her custom, one might say against her
principles, to risk a performance with the Chicago orchestra without
rehearsal, to stay the night in New York and go west by the afternoon
train the next day. She telegraphed Chicago, but she did not telegraph
Blasius, because she wished--the old fallacy of affection!--to "surprise"
him. She could take it for granted that, at eleven on a cold winter
night, he would be in the Tenth Street house and nowhere else in New
York. She sent Poppas--paler than usual with accusing scorn--and her
trunks on to Chicago, and with only her travelling bag and a sense of
being very audacious in her behaviour and still very much in love, she
took a cab for Tenth Street.

Since it was her intention to disturb Blasius as little as possible and
to delight him as much as possible, she let herself in with her latch-key
and went directly to his room. She did not find him there. Indeed, she
found him where he should not have been at all. There must have been a
trying scene.

Ruzenka was sent away in the morning, and the other two maids as well. By
eight o'clock Cressida and Bouchalka had the house to themselves. Nobody
had any breakfast. Cressida took the afternoon train to keep her
engagement with Theodore Thomas, and to think over the situation. Blasius
w