He breathed deeply in the open air.  Glancing back at the house when he had crossed the street, he saw a white hand waved to him at a window; it hurried his step.

On the following day, Mrs. Florio visited her friend Miss Bonnicastle, who had some time since exchanged the old quarters in Great Portland Street for a house in Pimlico, where there was a larger studio (workshop, as she preferred to call it), hung about with her own and other people’s designs.  The artist of the poster was full as ever of vitality and of good-nature, but her humour had not quite the old spice; a stickler for decorum would have said that she was decidedly improved, that she had grown more womanly; and something of this change appeared also in her work, which tended now to the graceful rather than the grotesque.  She received her fashionable visitant with off-hand friendliness, not altogether with cordiality.

“Oh, I’ve something to show you.  Do you know that name?”

Olga took a business-card, and read upon it:  “Alexander Otway, Dramatic & Musical Agent.”

“It’s his brother,” she said, in a voice of quiet surprise.

“I thought so.  The man called yesterday—­wants a fetching thing to boom an Irish girl at the halls.  There’s her photo.”

It represented a piquant person in short skirts; a face neither very pretty nor very young, but likely to be deemed attractive by the public in question.  They amused themselves over it for a moment.

“He used to be a journalist,” said Olga.  “Does he seem to be doing well?”

“Couldn’t say.  A great talker, and a furious Jingo.”

“Jingo?”

“This woman is to sing a song of his composition, all about the Empire.  Not the hall; the British.  Glorifies the Flag, that blessed rag—­a rhyme I suggested to him, and asked him to pay me for.  It’s a taking tune, and we shall have it everywhere, no doubt.  He sang a verse—­I wish you could have heard him.  A queer fish!”

Olga walked about, seeming to inspect the pictures, but in reality much occupied with her thoughts.

“Well,” she said presently, “I only looked in, dear, to say how-do-you-do.”

Miss Bonnicastle was drawing; she turned, as if to shake hands, but looked her friend in the face with a peculiar expression, far more earnest than was commonly seen in her.

“You called on Kite yesterday morning.”

Olga, with slight confusion, admitted that she had been to see the artist.  For some weeks Kite had suffered from an ailment which confined him to the house; he could not walk, and indeed could do nothing but lie and read, or talk of what he would do, when he recovered his health.  Cheap claret having lost its inspiring force, the poor fellow had turned to more potent beverages, and would ere now have sunk into inscrutable deeps but for Miss Bonnicastle, who interested herself in his welfare.  Olga, after losing sight of him for nearly two years, by chance discovered his whereabouts and his circumstances, and twice in the past week had paid him a visit.