Was this really Douglas Falloden—­this grave, courteous man—­without a trace of the “blood” upon him?  He seemed to her years older than he had been in May, and related, for the first time, to the practical every-day world.  This absorption too in Otto Radowitz and his affairs—­incredible!  He and Connie first eagerly discussed certain domestic details of the cottage—­the cook, the food, the draughts, the arrangements to be made for Otto’s open-air treatment which the doctors were now insisting on—­with an anxious minuteness!  Nora could hardly keep her face straight in the distance—­they were so like a pair of crooning housewives.  Then he began on his French visit, sitting sideways on his chair, his elbow on the back of it, and his hand thrust into his curly mass of hair—­handsomer, thought Nora, than ever.  And there was Connie listening spell-bound in a low chair opposite, her delicate pale profile distinct against the dark panelling of the room, her eyes fixed on him.  Nora’s perplexed eyes travelled from one to the other.

As to the story of the Orpheus and its inventor, both girls hung upon it.  Falloden had tracked Auguste Chaumart to his garret in Montmartre, and had found in him one of those marvellous French workmen, inheritors of the finest technical tradition in the world, who are the true sons of the men who built and furnished and carved Versailles, and thereby revolutionised the minor arts of Europe.  A small pinched fellow!—­with a sickly wife and children sharing his tiny workshop, and a brain teeming with inventions, of which the electric piano, forerunner of the Welte-Mignons of later days, was but the chief among many.  He had spent a fortune upon it, could get no capitalist to believe in it, and no firm to take it up.  Then Falloden’s astonishing letter and offer of funds, based on Radowitz’s report—­itself the echo of a couple of letters from Paris—­had encouraged the starving dreamer to go on.

Falloden reproduced the scene, as described to him by the chief actor in it, when the inventor announced to his family that the thing was accomplished, the mechanism perfect, and how that very night they should hear Chopin’s great Fantasia, Op. 49, played by its invisible hands.

The moment came.  Wife and children gathered, breathless.  Chaumart turned on the current, released the machinery.

“Ecoutez, mes enfants!  Ecoutez, Henriette!”

They listened—­with ears, with eyes, with every faculty strained to its utmost.  And nothing happened!—­positively nothing—­beyond a few wheezing or creaking sounds.  The haggard inventor in despair chased everybody out of the room, and sat looking at the thing, wondering whether to smash it, or kill himself.  Then an idea struck him.  In feverish haste he took the whole mechanism to pieces again, sitting up all night.  And as the morning sun rose, he discovered in the very heart of the creature, to which by now he attributed an uncanny and independent life, the most elementary