d the people behind him noticed him and thought he looked
strong. He had heard Bonanni in her best days and many great lyric
sopranos from Patti to Melba, and he was thinking that none of them
had sung the mad scene better than Cordova, who had only been on the
stage two years, and was now in New York for the first time. But he
had already heard her in London and Paris, and he knew her. He had
first met her at a breakfast on board Logotheti's yacht at Cap Martin.
Logotheti was a young Greek financier who lived in Paris and wanted to
marry her. He was rather mad, and had tried to carry her off on the
night of the dress rehearsal before her _debut_, but had somehow got
himself locked up for somebody else. Since then he had grown calmer,
but he still worshipped at the shrine of the Cordova. He was not
the only one, however; there were several, including the very
distinguished English man of letters, Edmund Lushington, who had known
her before she had begun to sing on the stage.

But Lushington was in England and Logotheti was in Paris, and on the
night of the accident Cordova had not many acquaintances in the house
besides the bony man with grey hair; for though society had been
anxious to feed her and get her to sing for nothing, and to play
bridge with her, she had never been inclined to accept those
attentions. Society in New York claimed her, on the ground that she
was a lady and was an American on her mother's side. Yet she insisted
on calling herself a professional, because singing was her profession,
and society thought this so strange that it at once became suspicious
and invented wild and unedifying stories about her; and the reporters
haunted the lobby of her hotel, and gossiped with their friends the
detectives, who also spent much time there in a professional way for
the general good, and were generally what English workmen call wet
smokers.

Cordova herself was altogether intent on what she was doing and was
not thinking of her friends, of Lushington, or Logotheti, nor of the
bony man in the stalls; certainly not of society, though it was richly
represented by diamonds in the subscriber's tier. Indeed the jewellery
was so plentiful and of such expensive quality that the whole row of
boxes shone like a vast coronet set with thousands of precious stones.
When the music did not amuse society, the diamonds and rubies twinkled
and glittered uneasily, but when Cordova was trilling her wildest
they were quite still