ong fingers. "_Couleur de gloire,
couleur des reines!_" I heard him murmur. He thrust the sleeve under his
chin and closed his eyes. His loud, rapid breathing was the only sound in
the room. If Cressida brushed back his hair or touched his hand, he
looked up long enough to give her a smile of utter adoration, naive and
uninquiring, as if he were smiling at a dream or a miracle.

The nurse was gone for an hour, and we sat quietly, Cressida with her
eyes fixed on Bouchalka, and I absorbed in the strange atmosphere of the
house, which seemed to seep in under the door and through the walls.
Occasionally we heard a call for "_de l'eau chaude_!" and the heavy trot
of a serving woman on the stairs. On the floor below somebody was
struggling with Schubert's Marche Militaire on a coarse-toned upright
piano. Sometimes, when a door was opened, one could hear a parrot
screaming, "_Voila, voila, tonnerre!_" The house was built before 1870,
as one could tell from windows and mouldings, and the walls were thick.
The sounds were not disturbing and Bouchalka was probably used to them.

When the nurse returned and we rose to go, Bouchalka still lay with his
cheek on her cloak, and Cressida left it. "It seems to please him," she
murmured as we went down the stairs. "I can go home without a wrap. It's
not far." I had, of course, to give her my furs, as I was not singing
_Donna Anna_ tomorrow evening and she was.

After this I was not surprised by any devout attitude in which I happened
to find the Bohemian when I entered Cressida's music-room unannounced,
or by any radiance on her face when she rose from the window-seat in the
alcove and came down the room to greet me.

Bouchalka was, of course, very often at the Opera now. On almost any
night when Cressida sang, one could see his narrow black head--high
above the temples and rather constrained behind the ears--peering from
some part of the house. I used to wonder what he thought of Cressida as
an artist, but probably he did not think seriously at all. A great voice,
a handsome woman, a great prestige, all added together made a "great
artist," the common synonym for success. Her success, and the material
evidences of it, quite blinded him. I could never draw from him anything
adequate about Anna Straka, Cressida's Slavic rival, and this perhaps
meant that he considered comparison disloyal. All the while that Cressida
was singing reliably, and satisfying the management, Straka was singing