walking toward him. He never forgot that tea rose!
Confound him--probably another benefit for one of his indigent song
birds. As Howat was about to speak the Colonel disappeared. It was
Scalchi, in street dress, a yellow fur about her throat, warm,
seductive. He had sent the divine Page the bouquet in paper lace. But
she too vanished. He heard the strains of an orchestra; lingering he had
missed the overture, and it might be the first duet--with Geister in
superb voice. He was waiting for Mariana, that was it ... always late.
Then her hand was under his arm. But it was the doctor from Jaffa.

Rudolph was at the foot of the bed, and the two men moved aside,
conversed impolitely in hushed tones. I'm sick, he thought lucidly. One
word reached him--oxygen. It all melted away again, into a black lake
with ghostly swans, a painted mouth and showering confetti; one of the
supreme waltzes that Johann Strauss alone could compose. Later a woman
in a folded linen cap was seated beside him, a chimera. But she laid
cool fingers on his Wrist, held a brownish, distasteful mixture to his
lips. A draught of egg nog was better, although it wasn't as persuasive
as some he had had: Bundy Provost's, for example.

Bundy was a galliard youth, but he was clear as ice underneath. He
wouldn't have let them put that thing over his, Howat's, face. He tried
to turn aside, but a cap of darkness descended upon him. Afterward his
breathing was easier. A blue iron tank was standing nearby, and the
nurse was removing a rubber mask attached to a flexible tube. The latter
led from a glass bottle, with a crystal pipe into the tank; the bottle
held water; and the water was troubled with subsiding, clear bubbles.
More of the dark, unpleasant mixture, more egg nog. Why did they trouble
and trouble him--already he was late getting to Irving Place.

The opera, as he had feared, had commenced; and it was at once strange
and familiar. The chorus and orchestra were singing in a deep ground
tone; the stage was set with a row of great, seething furnaces; glaring
white bars of light cut through vaporous, yellow gases and showered
steel sparks where coppery figures were labouring obscurely in a flaming
heat that rolled out over the audience. There was a shrilling of
violins, and then a deafening blare of brass, an appalling volume of
sound pouring out like boiling metal.... But here was Rudolph; the
performance was at an end; it was time to go home.

"I took the li