Mexico, where he had been trained in the pine forests by
an old Mexican and an ill-tempered, lame master-bird, half thrush, that
taught young birds to sing. This morning, in his song there were flashes
of silvery Southern springtime; they opened inviting roads of memory. In
half an hour he had sung his disconsolate mistress to sleep.

That evening Kitty sat curled up on the deep couch before the fire,
awaiting Pierce Tevis. Her costume was folds upon folds of diaphanous
white over equally diaphanous rose, with a line of white fur about her
neck. Her beautiful arms were bare. Her tiny Chinese slippers were
embroidered so richly that they resembled the painted porcelain of old
vases. She looked like a sultan's youngest, newest bride; a beautiful
little toy-woman, sitting at one end of the long room which composed
about her,--which, in the soft light, seemed happily arranged for her.
There were flowers everywhere: rose-trees; camellia-bushes, red and
white; the first forced hyacinths of the season; a feathery mimosa-tree,
tall enough to stand under.

The long front of Kitty's study was all windows. At one end was the
fireplace, before which she sat. At the other end, back in a lighted
alcove, hung a big, warm, sympathetic interior by Lucien Simon,--a group
of Kitty's friends having tea in the painter's salon in Paris. The room
in the picture was flooded with early lamp-light, and one could feel the
grey, chill winter twilight in the Paris streets outside. There stood the
cavalier-like old composer, who had done much for Kitty, in his most
characteristic attitude, before the hearth. Mme. Simon sat at the
tea-table. B----, the historian, and H----, the philologist, stood in
animated discussion behind the piano, while Mme. H---- was tying on the
bonnet of her lovely little daughter. Marcel Durand, the physicist, sat
alone in a corner, his startling black-and-white profile lowered
broodingly, his cold hands locked over his sharp knee. A genial,
red-bearded sculptor stood over him, about to touch him on the shoulder
and waken him from his dream.

This painting made, as it were, another room; so that Kitty's study on
Central Park West seemed to open into that charming French interior, into
one of the most highly harmonized and richly associated rooms in Paris.
There her friends sat or stood about, men distinguished, women at once
plain and beautiful, with their furs and bonnets, their clothes that were
so distinctly not smart