nbach and
Signorina Baci-Roventi, the Italian contralto who could pass for a man
so well that she was said to have fought a real duel with sabres and
wounded her adversary before he discovered that she was the very lady
he had lately left for another--a regular Mademoiselle de Maupin! Had
not Lushington once seen her kiss Margaret on both cheeks in a moment
of enthusiastic admiration? He was not the average young man who falls
in love with a singer, either; he knew the stage and its depths only
too well, for he had his own mother's life always before him, a
perpetual reproach.

Though Margaret had at first revolted inwardly against the details of
her professional surroundings, she had grown used to them by sure and
fatal degrees, and things that would once have disgusted her were
indifferent to her now. Men who have been educated in conditions of
ordinary refinement and who have volunteered in the ranks or gone to
sea before the mast have experienced something very like what befell
Margaret; but men are not delicately nurtured beings whose bloom is
damaged by the rough air of reality, and the camp and the forecastle
are not the stage. Perhaps nothing that is necessary shocks really
sensible people; it is when disagreeable things are perfectly useless
and quite avoidable--in theory--that they are most repugnant to men
like Edmund Lushington. He had warned Margaret of what was in store
for her, before she had taken the final step; but he had not warned
himself that in spite of her bringing-up she might get used to it
all and end by not resenting it any more than the rest of the
professionals with whom she associated. It was this that chilled him.

'I hope I'm not interrupting your work,' he said as he sat down.

'My work?'

'I heard you studying when they let me in.'

'Oh!'

His voice sounded very indifferent, and a pause followed Margaret's
mild ejaculation.

'It's rather a thankless opera for the soprano, I always think,' he
observed. 'The tenor has it all his own way.'

'_The Elisir d'Amore_?'

'Yes.'

'I've not rehearsed it yet,' said Margaret rather drearily. 'I don't
know.'

He evidently meant to talk of indifferent things again, as at their
last meeting, and she felt that she was groping in the dark for
something she had lost. There was no sympathy in his voice, no
interest, and she was inclined to ask him plainly what was the matter;
but her pride hindered her still, and she only looked at him with