“‘Which?’ I screamed. ‘Not the hat-trunk?’

“‘No, no; mia voce. It is gone since Ravenna.’

“He thought he had lost his voice somewhere along the way.  At last I told the inspector that I couldn’t live without Peppo, and that I would throw myself into the bay.  I took him into my confidence.  Of course, when I found I had to play on that string, I wished I hadn’t made the boy such a spectacle.  But ridiculous as he was, I managed to make the inspector believe that I had kidnapped him, and that he was indispensable to my happiness.  I found that incorruptible official, like most people, willing to aid one so utterly depraved.  I could never have got that boy out for any proper, reasonable purpose, such as giving him a job or sending him to school.  Well, it’s a queer world!  But I must cut all that and get to the Steins.

“That first winter Peppo had no chance at the Opera.  There was an iron ring about him, and my interest in him only made it all the more difficult.  We’ve become a nest of intrigues down there; worse than the Scala.  Peppo had to scratch along just any way.  One evening he came to me and said he could get an engagement to sing for the grand rich Steins, but the condition was that I should sing with him.  They would pay, oh, anything!  And the fact that I had sung a private engagement with him would give him other engagements of the same sort.  As you know, I never sing private engagements; but to help the boy along, I consented.

“On the night of the party, Peppo and I went to the house together in a taxi.  My car was ailing.  At the hour when the music was about to begin, the host and hostess appeared at my dressing-room, up-stairs.  Isn’t he wonderful?  Your description was most inadequate.  I never encountered such restrained, frozen, sculptured vanity.  My hostess struck me as extremely good natured and jolly, though somewhat intimate in her manner.  Her reassuring pats and smiles puzzled me at the time, I remember, when I didn’t know that she had anything in particular to be large-minded and charitable about.  Her husband made known his willingness to conduct me to the music-room, and we ceremoniously descended a staircase blooming like the hanging-gardens of Babylon.  From there I had my first glimpse of the company.  They were strange people.  The women glittered like Christmas-trees.  When we were half-way down the stairs, the buzz of conversation stopped so suddenly that some foolish remark I happened to be making rang out like oratory.  Every face was lifted toward us.  My host and I completed our descent and went the length of the drawing-room through a silence which somewhat awed me.  I couldn’t help wishing that one could ever get that kind of attention in a concert-hall.  In the music-room Stein insisted upon arranging things for me.  I must say that he was neither awkward nor stupid, not so wooden as most rich men who rent singers.  I was properly