“So you’ve turned up again,” he remarked, as he held out his hand with a smile, “I was led to believe that the last parting would be final.”

“Oh, it was,” she answered lightly, “but there’s an end even to finality, you know.”

The flute-like soprano of her voice fell pleasantly upon his ears, and as he looked into her face he told himself that it was marvellous how well she had managed to preserve an effect of youthfulness.  Under the flaring wings in her hat her eyes were still clear and large and heavy lidded, her thin red lips still held the shape of their sensual curve.  A white fur boa was thrown carelessly about her neck, and he remembered that underneath it, encircling her short throat there was the soft crease of flesh which the ancient poets had named “the necklace of Venus.”

“Well, I can but accept this visit as a compliment, I suppose,” he observed with amiable indifference, “it means—­doesn’t it? that you won your fight about the opera contract?”

An expression of anger—­of the uncontrolled, majestic anger of a handsome animal, awoke in her face, and she pulled off her long white glove as if seeking to free herself from some restraint of custom.  Her hand, he noticed, with a keen eye for such feminine details, was large, roughly shaped and over fleshy about the wrist.

“I’d starve before I’d sing again by that old contract,” she responded.  “No, it’s not opera—­Parker refused to pay me what I asked and I held out to the end—­I shall sing in concert for the first time, and I shan’t be happy until I have every seat in the opera house left empty.”

He laughed with an acute enjoyment of her repressed violence.  “Oh, you’re welcome to mine,” he returned good-humouredly, “but what is the day of your great first battle?”

“Not until December.  I’m going West and South before I sing in New York.”

“Then you aren’t here for much of a stay, after all?”

She shook her head and the orange coloured wings in her hat waved to and fro.

“Only a few days at a time.  After Christmas I sail back again.  In February I’m engaged for Monte Carlo.”

Then her expression underwent a curious change—­as if personality, colour, passion pulsed into her half averted face—­and the hard professional tones in which she had spoken were softened as if by an awakening memory.

“So you still keep my portrait, I see,” she observed, lifting her eyes to the picture above the mantel, “you don’t hate me, then, so bitterly as I thought.”

He shrugged his shoulders with the gesture he had acquired abroad.

“I did take it down, but it left a smudge on the wall, so I had to put it back again.”

“Then you sometimes think of me?” she enquired, with curiosity.

“Not when I can help it,” he retorted, laughing.

His ironic pleasantry stung her into an irritation which showed plainly in her face; and she appeared, for the first time, to bend her intelligence toward some definite achievement.