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"Is it so late?" But on seeing his disturbance, she added: "It will be all right. Louise was never punctual in her life."
He did his best to look unconcerned, and they spoke of that evening's ABENDUNTERHALTUNG, at which Furst was to play. But by the time the clock struck four, Maurice had relapsed, in spite of himself, into silence. Madeleine rallied him.
"You must make shift with my company, Maurice. Not but what I am sure Louise will come. But you see from this what she is—the most unreliable creature in the world."
To pass the time, she suggested that he should help her to make tea, and they were both busy, when the electric bell in the passage whizzed harshly, and the next moment there came a knock at the door. But it was not Louise. Instead, two persons entered, one of whom was Heinrich Krafft, the other a short, thickset girl, in a man's felt hat and a closely buttoned ulster.
On recognising her visitors, Madeleine made a movement of annoyance, and drew her brows together. "You, Heinz!" she said.
Undaunted by this greeting, Krafft advanced to her and, taking her hands, kissed them, one after the other. He was also about to kiss her on the lips, but she defended herself. "Stop! We are not alone."
"Just for that reason," said the girl in the ulster drily.
"What ill wind blows you here to-day?" Madeleine asked him.
As he was still wearing his hat, she took it off, and dropped it on the floor beside him; then she recollected Maurice, and made him known to the other two. Coming forward, Maurice recalled to Krafft's memory where they had already met, and what had passed between them. Before he had finished speaking, Krafft burst into an unmannerly peal of laughter. Madeleine laughed, too, and shook her finger at him. "You have been up to your tricks again!" Avery Hill, the girl in the ulster, did not laugh aloud, but a smile played round her mouth, which Maurice found even more disagreeable than the mirth of which he had been the innocent cause. He coloured, and withdrew to the window.
Krafft was so convulsed that he was obliged to sit down on the sofa, where Madeleine fanned him with a sheet of music. He had been seized by a kind of paroxysm, and laughed on and on, in a mirthless way, till Avery Hill said suddenly and angrily: "Stop laughing at once, Heinz! You will have hysterics."
In an instant he was sobered, and now he seemed to fall, without transition, into a mood of dejection. Taking out his penknife, he set to paring his nails, in a precise and preoccupied manner. Madeleine turned to Maurice.
"You'll wonder what all this is about," she said apologetically. "But Heinz is never happier than when he has succeeded in imposing on some one—as he evidently did on you."
"Indeed!" said Maurice. Their laughter had been offensive to him, and he found Krafft, and Madeleine with him, exceedingly foolish.
There was a brief silence. Krafft was absorbed in what he was doing, and Avery Hill, on sitting down, had lighted a cigarette, which she smoked steadily, in long-drawn whiffs. She was a pretty girl, in spite of her severe garb, in spite, too, of her expression, which was too composed and too self-sure to be altogether pleasing. Her face was fresh of skin, below smooth fair hair, and her lips were the red, ripe lips of Botticelli's angels and Madonnas. But the under one, being fuller than the other, gave the mouth a look of over-decision, and it would be difficult to imagine anything less girlish than were the cold grey eyes.
"We came for the book you promised to lend Heinz," she said, blowing off the spike of ash that had accumulated at the tip of the cigarette. "He could not rest till he had it."
Madeleine placed a saucer on the table with the request to use it as an ash-tray, and taking down a volume of De Quincey from the hanging shelf, held it out to Krafft.
"There you are. It will interest me to hear what you make of it."
Krafft ceased his paring to glance at the title-page. "I shall probably not open it," he said.
Madeleine laughed, and gave him a light blow on the hand with the book. "How like you that is! As soon as you know that you can get a thing, you don't want it any longer."
"Yes, that's Heinz all over," said Avery Hill. "Only what he hasn't got, seems worth having."
Krafft shut his knife with a click, and put it back in his pocket. "And that's what you women can't understand, isn't it?—that the best of things is the wishing for them. Once there, and they are nothing—only another delusion. The happiest man is the man whose wishes are never fulfilled. He always has a moon to cry for."
"Come, come now," said Madeleine. "We know your love for paradox. But not to-day. There's no time for philosophising today. Besides, you are in a pessimistic mood, and that's a bad sign."
"I and pessimism? Listen, heart of my heart, I have a new story for you." He moved closer to her, and put his arm round her neck. "There was once a man and his wife——"
But, at the first word, Madeleine put her hands to her ears.
"Mercy, have mercy, Heinz! No stories, I entreat you. And behave yourself, too. Take your arm away." She tried to remove it. "I have told you already, I can't have you here to-day. I'm expecting a visitor."
He laid his head on her shoulder. "Let him come. Let the whole world come. I don't budge. I am happy here."
"You must go and be happy elsewhere," said Madeleine more decisively than she had yet spoken. "And before she comes, too."
"She? What she?"
"Never mind."
"For that very reason, Mada."
She whispered a word in his ear. He looked at her, incredulously at first, then whimsically, with a sham dismay; and then, as if Maurice had only just taken shape for him, he turned and looked at him also, and from him to Madeleine, and back to him, finally bursting afresh into a roar of laughter. Madeleine laid her hand over his mouth. "Take him away, do," she said to Avery Hill—"as a favour to me."
"Yes, when I have finished my cigarette," said the girl without stirring.
Unsettled all the same, it would seem, by what he had heard, Krafft rose and shuffled about the room, with his hands in his pockets. Approaching Maurice, he even stood for a moment and contemplated him, with a kind of mock gravity. Maurice acted as if he did not see Krafft; long since, he had taken up a magazine, and, half hidden in a chair between window and writing-table, pretended to bury himself in its contents. But he heard very plainly all that passed, and, at the effect produced on Krafft by the name of the expected visitor, his hands trembled with anger. If the fellow had stood looking at him for another second, he would have got up and knocked him down. But Krafft turned nonchalantly to the piano, where his attention was caught by a song that was standing on the rack. He chuckled, and set about making merciless fun of the music—the composer was an elderly singing-teacher, of local fame. Madeleine grew angry, and tried to take it from him.
"Hold your tongue, Heinz! If your own songs were more like this, they would have a better chance of success. Now be quiet! I won't hear another word. Herr Wendling is a very good friend of mine."
"A friend! Heavens! She says friend as if it were an excuse for him.—Mada, let your friend cease making music if he hopes for salvation. Let him buy a broom and sweep the streets—let him——"
"You are disgusting!"
She had got the music from him, but he was already at the piano, parodying, from memory, the conventional accompaniment and sentimental words of the song. "And this," he said, "from the learned ass who is not yet convinced that the FEUERZAUBER is music, and who groans like a dredge when the last act of SIEGFRIED is mentioned. Wendling and Wagner! Listen to this!—for once, I am a full-blooded Wagnerite."
He felt after the chords that prelude Brunnhilde's awakening by Siegfried. Until now, Avery Hill had sat indifferent, as though what went on had nothing to do with her; but no sooner had Krafft commenced to play than she grew uneasy; her eyes lost their cold assurance, and, suddenly getting up and going round to the front of the