the room where, on a divan, she had received her hosts, the seventy or more men of fashion grouped in irreproachable black and white, with her suave manager, the inevitable tea rose in his lapel, on a knee before Adelina, kissing her hand.  The dinner had been laid in the ball room, lit with a multitude of wax candles.  The features, appearance, of the more prominent men, of Mahun Stetson and Daly and William Steinway, were clear still.  The original plan had been to include ladies at the dinner, but the latter, affecting outrage at the Diva’s affair with the Marquis de Caux, had refused to lend their countenance to the singer’s occasion.  His smile broadened—­this was so characteristic of New York in the eighties.  How different it had been; but it was no better, he added silently, now.

It was mid-August, and the air floating in through an open door was ladened with the richness of ultra-luxuriant vegetation, the persistent, metallic whirring of locusts, the mechanical repetition of katydids.  One of the owls that inhabited the old willow tree before the house cried softly....  How different!  He straightened up from the book open on his knees, and the glass fell with a small clatter over his formal, starched linen, swinging for an instant on its narrow ribbon.  The unwavering lamp light was deflected in green points through the emeralds of his studs.

The thought of bygone, gala nights of opera fastened on him with a peculiar significance—­suddenly they seemed symbolic of his lost youth.  Such tides of impassioned song, such poignant, lyric passion, such tragic sacrifice and death, were all in the extravagant key of youth.  The very convention of opera, the glorified unreality of its language, the romantic impossibility of its colour, the sparkling dress like the sparkling voices and blue gardens and gilded halls, were the authentic expression of the resplendent vagaries of early years.

The winter of eighty three and four; his first season of New York music.  The autumn before he had returned from the five years spent in Europe, in Paris practically, with Bundy Provost, related to him by a marriage in the past generation, through the Jannans.  He had gone abroad immediately after his graduation as a lawyer; and in the indolent culture of the five Parisian years, he now realized, he had permanently lost all hold on his profession.  At his return he had drifted imperceptibly into an existence of polite pleasure.  It had been different with Bundy; he had gone into the banking house of Provost, lately established in New York; and, with the extraordinary pertinacity and acumen sometimes developed by worldly and rich young men, he had steadily risen to a place of financial importance.  An opening had, of course, been offered to Howat Penny when he had definitely decided not to settle in Philadelphia, where the Pennys had always been associated, and pursue the law.  And, at first, he had occupied a desk in the Provost counting rooms.  But he had soon grown discontented, he disliked routine and a clerk’s condition; and, after two years of annoyed effort, withdrew to lead a more congenial existence on a secure, adequate income.