it was the violin.
Well, you got it back. What will you say if I find some Camembert? Do
stop meowing. Any one might think you didn't have me."

At her young laughter, he groaned. "Formerly if I let a day go without
practising, I noticed it. If I let two days go, Toscanini noticed it.
Now it's weeks and weeks. It's killing me."

To cheer him, Cassy said gaily: "The artist never dies."

But it did not cheer him. Besides, though Cassy had laughed, there had
been a tugging at her heartstrings. Shabby, unkempt, in a frayed
dressing-gown, his arm in a dismal sling, he looked so out of it, so
forlorn, so old.

He had shuffled away. She bit her lip. Later, when he had had his
tenderloin and she had department-stored herself, a pint of grocer's
burgundy had reduced him to tears.

The day before it had seemed to her that the frock would do. But her
judgment had been hurried. Shops, crowds, the vibrations of both,
devitalised and confused her. In choosing the frock she had not
therefore given it the consideration which it perhaps did not merit, and
now her mirror shrieked it. The frock was not suited to her. Nothing was
suited to her, except the produce of baronial halls, where the simplest
thing exceeded the dreams of avarice, or else the harlequinades which
she herself devised. None the less she would have liked to have had her
father exclaim and tell her how smart she looked. He omitted it.

"Where are you going?"

"I told you. Dinner and the opera."

"Opera! There is no opera to-night. What do you mean? What did you tell
me?"

On the table were dishes and the lamentable bottle. Cassy, in doubt
whether to clear them then or later, hesitated. The hesitation he
misconstrued.

"You told me nothing. You tell me nothing. I am kept in the dark."

Cassy, adjusting the wrap which she had left open that he might admire
the unadmirable, moved to where he sat and touched him. "You're the
silliest kind of a silly. I told you yesterday. Perhaps the opera was
last night. But how could I go? Except that old black rag I had nothing
to wear. If there is no opera to-night, there will be a concert or
something. Don't you remember now? I was at the telephone."

He did remember, but apparently the recollection displeased. He growled.
"Yes. It was that Paliser."

"Well, why not? If it had not been for him, I would not have got the
catamount's money and you would not have had the burgundy."

But he was not to be mollified. The gro