He ate but little and went back to the studio to play dummy bridge with Mac and Whitaker.  A loud thump on the studio door and a Morse dot and dash announcement of identity on the bell just as he had pieced a pack of cards together, filled him with intense resentment.

“Max Kreiling!” he said with a sniff.  And a little later:  “Caesare!” He thought perhaps, feeling as he did in a mood for murder, he wouldn’t let them in, abuse the door panel and the bell as they would.  Whitaker did it for him.

“They’ll come in and play music on my piano,” he insisted sulkily, “and sing notes into my air and I repeat I’m in no mood for music.”

But Kreiling, big, blond and Teutonic, was already striding in with Caesare at his heels.  They filled the air with joyous greetings, thumped upon the intervening wall for Garry and unloaded their pockets and an institutional leather bag.

“Cheese,” rumbled Kreiling, “jam, coffee and mince pies.”

Caesare unsheathed his fiddle and played a preposterous rag-time interpretation of the Valkyrie’s battle-cry.  It evoked an instant response from the telephone.

“It’s Mac,” said Whitaker.  “He says he’ll be down in a jiffy and bring Jan with him.”

“Tell him,” grumbled Kenny, “to bring beer instead.  No fault of mine, Max,” he added, “if Jan comes down here and eats your cheese.  He’s a cheese lunatic.  Blame Tony.  He comes into my studio, does a Pied Piper stunt on his fiddle and the whole building appears.”

To Whitaker’s amusement nobody heeded Kenny’s petulance.  Caesare was already building a wood-fire in the fireplace, complaining of the chill.  Max Kreiling was furiously hunting missing sheets from a ragged stack of music on the piano and grumbling in German about his host’s habits.  The fire flared.  Caesare’s dark face, always tense, relaxed into smiles.  When Garry appeared the wood-fire was blazing and Caesare was plucking in nervous pizzicato at the strings of his fiddle.  Later Mac arrived with beer, a loaf of rye bread and Jan, who gravitated at once by permanent instinct to the cheese.

Kenny morosely hunted cigarettes and reflected with raised eyebrows that the studio was never entirely his, not even when he wanted vehemently to quarrel with Whitaker.  And last came Sidney Fahr, round and merry, who looked casually in, nibbled at a gumdrop and professed amazement to find so many there.  Kenny unreasonably chose to take affront at his chronic amazement and withdrew to a corner in a state of gloom and disgust, whence Kreiling, sensitively alive to atmospheric dissonances, routed him forth with the heated accusation that he was not gemuetlich.

Whitaker looked on through a film of smoke.  Ordinarily he knew it was the sort of evening that fired Kenny to his maddest mood of fun and sparkle.  It was the romance of his Bohemia, the thing upon which he fed his sense of the picturesque, ignoring the lesser things that bothered Brian.  Men loved him.  In the glow of their camaraderie he was always at his best, excited, joyous, irresponsibly gay and hearty.  But to-night the fun and sparkle passed him by.  Garry was right.  He was surely not himself.  Could it be—­just Brian?