‘I hope I have left you enough,’ he said, as he prepared to go.  ’My throat felt like a rusty gun-barrel.’

‘Fright is very bad for the voice,’ Schreiermeyer remarked, as the call-boy handed him another bottle of beer through the open door.

Stromboli took no notice of the direct imputation.  He had taken a very small and fine handkerchief from his sporran and was carefully tucking it into his collar with some idea of protecting his throat.  When this was done his admiration for his colleague broke out again without the slightest warning.

‘You were superb, magnificent, surpassing!’ he cried.

He seized Cordova’s chalked hands, pressed them to his own whitened chin, by sheer force of stage habit, because the red on his lips would have come off on them, and turned away.

‘Surpassing!  Magnificent!  What a woman!’ he roared in tremendous tones as he strode away through the dim corridor towards the stage and his own dressing-room on the other side.

Meanwhile Schreiermeyer, who was quite as thirsty as the tenor, drank what the latter had left in the only glass there was, and set the full bottle beside the latter on the deal table.

‘There is your beer,’ he said, calling attention to what he had done.

Cordova nodded carelessly and sat down on one of the crazy chairs before the toilet-table.  Her maid at once came forward and took off her wig, and her own beautiful brown hair appeared, pressed and matted close to her head in a rather disorderly coil.

‘You must be tired,’ said the manager, with more consideration than he often showed to any one whose next engagement was already signed.  ’I’ll find out how many were killed in the explosion and then I’ll get hold of the reporters.  You’ll have two columns and a picture to-morrow.’

Schreiermeyer rarely took the trouble to say good-morning or good-night, and Cordova heard the door shut after him as he went out.

‘Lock it,’ she said to her maid.  ’I’m sure that madman is about the theatre again.’

The maid obeyed with alacrity.  She was very tall and dark, and when she had entered Cordova’s service two years ago she had been positively cadaverous.  She herself said that her appearance had been the result of living many years with the celebrated Madame Bonanni, who was a whirlwind, an earthquake, a phenomenon, a cosmic force.  No one who had lived with her in her stage days had ever grown fat; it was as much as a very strong constitution could do not to grow thin.

Madame Bonanni had presented the cadaverous woman to the young Primadonna as one of the most precious of her possessions, and out of sheer affection.  It was true that since the great singer had closed her long career and had retired to live in the country, in Provence, she dressed with such simplicity as made it possible for her to exist without the long-faithful, all-skilful, and iron-handed Alphonsine; and the maid, on her side, was so thoroughly a professional theatrical dresser that she must have died of inanition in what she would have called private life.  Lastly, she had heard that Madame Bonanni had now given up the semblance, long far from empty, but certainly vain, of a waist, and dressed herself in a garment resembling a priest’s cassock, buttoned in front from her throat to her toes.