ide the latter on the deal table.

'There is your beer,' he said, calling attention to what he had done.

Cordova nodded carelessly and sat down on one of the crazy chairs
before the toilet-table. Her maid at once came forward and took off
her wig, and her own beautiful brown hair appeared, pressed and matted
close to her head in a rather disorderly coil.

'You must be tired,' said the manager, with more consideration than
he often showed to any one whose next engagement was already signed.
'I'll find out how many were killed in the explosion and then I'll
get hold of the reporters. You'll have two columns and a picture
to-morrow.'

Schreiermeyer rarely took the trouble to say good-morning or
good-night, and Cordova heard the door shut after him as he went out.

'Lock it,' she said to her maid. 'I'm sure that madman is about the
theatre again.'

The maid obeyed with alacrity. She was very tall and dark, and
when she had entered Cordova's service two years ago she had been
positively cadaverous. She herself said that her appearance had been
the result of living many years with the celebrated Madame Bonanni,
who was a whirlwind, an earthquake, a phenomenon, a cosmic force. No
one who had lived with her in her stage days had ever grown fat; it
was as much as a very strong constitution could do not to grow thin.

Madame Bonanni had presented the cadaverous woman to the young
Primadonna as one of the most precious of her possessions, and out of
sheer affection. It was true that since the great singer had closed
her long career and had retired to live in the country, in Provence,
she dressed with such simplicity as made it possible for her to exist
without the long-faithful, all-skilful, and iron-handed Alphonsine;
and the maid, on her side, was so thoroughly a professional theatrical
dresser that she must have died of inanition in what she would have
called private life. Lastly, she had heard that Madame Bonanni had now
given up the semblance, long far from empty, but certainly vain, of a
waist, and dressed herself in a garment resembling a priest's cassock,
buttoned in front from her throat to her toes.

Alphonsine locked the door, and the Primadonna leaned her elbows on
the sordid toilet-table and stared at her chalked and painted face,
vaguely trying to recognise the features of Margaret Donne, the
daughter of the quiet Oxford scholar, her real self as she had been
two years ago, and by no means very different fr