'Perhaps,' suggested Fraulein Ottilie timidly, 'if you exercised a little strength of character--'

'Exercise?' roared Stromboli, not understanding her, for they spoke a jargon of Italian, German, and English. 'Exercise? The more I exercise, the more I eat! Ha, ha, ha! Exercise, indeed! You talk like crazy!'

'You will end on wheels,' said Schreiermeyer with cold contempt. 'You will stand on a little truck which will be moved about the stage from below. You will be lifted to Juliet's balcony by a hydraulic crane.

But you shall pay for the machinery. Oh yes, oh yes! I will have it in the contract! You shall be weighed. So much flesh to move, so much money.'

'Shylock!' suggested Logotheti, glancing at the statuette and laughing.

'Yes, Shylock and his five hundred pounds of flesh,' answered Schreiermeyer, with a faint smile that disappeared again at once.

'But I meant character--' began Fraulein Ottilie, trying to go back and get in a word.

'Character!' cried the Baci-Roventi with a deep note that made the open piano vibrate. 'His stomach is his heart, and his character is his appet.i.te!'

She bent her heavy brows and fixed her gleaming black eyes on him with a tragic expression.

'"Let them cant about decorum who have characters to lose,"' quoted Logotheti softly.

This delicate banter went on for twenty minutes, very much to Schreiermeyer's inward satisfaction, for it proved that at least four members of his company were on good terms with him and with each other; for when they had a grudge against him, real or imaginary, they became sullen and silent in his presence, and eyed him with the coldly ferocious expression of china dogs.

At last they all rose and went away in a body, leaving Margaret with Logotheti.

'I had quite forgotten that it was my birthday,' she said, when they were gone.

'I've brought you a little seal,' he answered, holding out the intaglio.

She took it and looked at it.

'How pretty!' she exclaimed. 'It's awfully kind of you to have remembered to-day, and I wanted a seal very much.'

'It's a silly little thing, just a head on some sort of green stone.

But I tried it on sealing-wax, and the impression is not so bad. I shall be very happy if it's of any use, for I'm always puzzling my brain to find something you may like.'

'Thanks very much. It's the thought I care for.' She laid the seal on the table beside her empty cup. 'And now that we are alone,' she went on, 'please tell me.'

'What?'

'How you found out what you told me at dinner last night.'

She leant back in the chair, raising her arms and joining her hands above her head against the high top of the chair, and stretching herself a little. The att.i.tude threw the curving lines of her figure into high relief, and was careless enough, but the tone in which she spoke was almost one of command, and there was a sort of expectant resentfulness in her eyes as they watched his face while she waited for his answer. She believed that he had paid to have her watched by some one who had bribed her servants.

'I did not find out anything,' he said quietly. 'I received an anonymous letter from New York giving me all the details of the scene.

The letter was written with the evident intention of injuring Mr. Van Torp. Whoever wrote it must have heard what you said to each other, and perhaps he was watching you through the keyhole. It is barely possible that by some accident he overheard the scene through the local telephone, if there was one in the room. Should you care to see that part of the letter which concerns you? It is not very delicately worded!'

Margaret's expression had changed; she had dropped her hands and was leaning forward, listening with interest.

'No,' she said, 'I don't care to see the letter, but who in the world can have written it? You say it was meant to injure Mr. Van Torp--not me.'

'Yes. There is nothing against you in it. On the contrary, the writer calls attention to the fact that there never was a word breathed against your reputation, in order to prove what an utter brute Van Torp must be.'

'Tell me,' Margaret said, 'was that story about Lady Maud in the same letter?'

'Oh dear, no! That is supposed to have happened the other day, but I got the letter last winter.'

'When?'

'In January, I think.'

'He came to see me soon after New Year's Day,' said Margaret.' I wish I knew who told--I really don't believe it was my maid.'

'I took the letter to one of those men who tell character by handwriting,' answered Logotheti. 'I don't know whether you believe in that, but I do a little. I got rather a queer result, considering that I only showed half-a-dozen lines, which could not give any idea of the contents.'

'What did the man say?'

'He said the writer appeared to be on the verge of insanity, if not actually mad; that he was naturally of an accurate mind, with ordinary business capacities, such as a clerk might have, but that he had received a much better education than most clerks get, and must at one time have done intellectual work. His madness, the man said, would probably take some violent form.'

'There's nothing very definite about all that,' Margaret observed.

'Why in the world should the creature have written to you, of all people, to destroy Mr. Van Torp's character?'

'The interview with you was only an incident,' answered Logotheti.

'There were other things, all tending to show that he is not a safe person to deal with.'

'Why should you ever deal with him?'

Logotheti smiled.

'There are about a hundred and fifty men in different countries who are regarded as the organs of the world's financial body. The very big ones are the vital organs. Van Torp has grown so much of late that he is probably one of them. Some people are good enough to think that I'm another. The blood of the financial body--call it gold, or credit, or anything you like--circulates through all the organs, and if one of the great vital ones gets out of order the whole body is likely to suffer. Suppose that Van Torp wished to do something with the Nickel Trust in Paris, and that I had private information to the effect that he was not a man to be trusted, and that I believed this information, don't you see that I should naturally warn my friends against him, and that our joint weight would be an effective obstacle in his way?'

'Yes, I see that. But, dear me! do you mean to say that all financiers must be strictly virtuous, like little woolly white lambs?'

Margaret laughed carelessly. If Lushington had heard her, his teeth would have been set on edge, but Logotheti did not notice the shade of expression and tone.

'I repeat that the account of the interview with you was a mere incident, thrown in to show that Van Torp occasionally loses his head and behaves like a madman.'

'I don't want to see the letter,' said Margaret, 'but what sort of accusations did it contain? Were they all of the same kind?'

'No. There was one other thing--something about a little girl called Ida, who is supposed to be the daughter of that old Alvah Moon who robbed your mother. You can guess the sort of thing the letter said without my telling you.'

Margaret leaned forward and poked the small wood fire with a pair of unnecessarily elaborate gilt tongs, and she nodded, for she remembered how Lord Creedmore had mentioned the child that afternoon. He had hesitated a little, and had then gone on speaking rather hurriedly.

She watched the sparks fly upward each time she touched the log, and she nodded slowly.

'What are you thinking of?' asked Logotheti.

But she did not answer for nearly half a minute. She was reflecting on a singular little fact which made itself clear to her just then. She was certainly not a child; she was not even a very young girl, at twenty-four; she had never been prudish, and she did not affect the pre-Serpentine innocence of Eve before the fall. Yet it was suddenly apparent to her that because she was a singer men treated her as if she were a married woman, and would have done so if she had been even five years younger. Talking to her as Margaret Donne, in Mrs.

Rushmore's house, two years earlier, Logotheti would not have approached such a subject as little Ida Moon's possible relation to Mr. Van Torp, because the Greek had been partly brought up in England and had been taught what one might and might not say to a 'nice English girl.' Margaret now reflected that since the day she had set foot upon the stage of the Opera she had apparently ceased to be a 'nice English girl' in the eyes of men of the world. The profession of singing in public, then, presupposed that the singer was no longer the more or less imaginary young girl, the hothouse flower of the social garden, whose perfect bloom the merest breath of worldly knowledge must blight for ever. Margaret might smile at the myth, but she could not ignore the fact that she was already as much detached from it in men's eyes as if she had entered the married state. The mere fact of realising that the hothouse blossom was part of the social legend proved the change in herself.

'So that is the secret about the little girl,' she said at last. Then she started a little, as if she had made a discovery. 'Good heavens!'

she exclaimed, poking the fire sharply. 'He cannot be as bad as that--even he!'