‘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 Fraeulein 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 appetite!’

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 attitude 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.