So the music had bridged the void! He could hear as well as see across the Atlantic! Again had that strange gift of language prepared the way for the exercise of an unknown faculty. Rhythm, singing, those inarticulate sounds which Noiré calls _clamor concomitans_, were the first utterances of primitive man when working in concert. Every savage race sings and dances, whether in peace or war. Uncivilized men work best when they can sing. In olden days soldiers sang as they marched against the enemy, and civilization has only substituted the bugles and drums for the songs. Beyond all question the unfettered exercise of Karl’s additional sense, that marvelous adjunct whereby his visual and auricular nerves annihilated distance, arose from the chance that an orchestra, mainly consisting of stringed instruments, struck up a measured cadence at a moment when Karl was actually straining his faculties to obtain some more precise notion of all that was taking place. And now Grier, who was somewhat in the position of an operator controlling some rarely sensitive electrical apparatus, learnt that he must focus the instrument with delicate precision if he were to avoid confusion. So he bent his attention on the pair at the table, seated himself metaphorically astride the iced cantaloup which decorated the center of their board, and gathered in each word they uttered, with the added zest of seeing the wary glances, the twitching nostrils, the drawn lips. Steindal had ordered a meal with the air of a connoisseur. That he had not exercised much tact in conveying his wants to the head waiter has been proved by the latter’s private opinion whispered in New York and overheard in Oxford. But Constantine merely toyed with the banquet, and his nervous state of preoccupation only increased as the champagne rose to his head. “I believe that girl will bring me bad luck,” was the first connected phrase he uttered which Karl could associate with Maggie Hutchinson’s personality, granted that she was the unseen attraction drawing him across the Atlantic. How well he remembered the Armenian’s voice, though a decade had passed since the last time he had heard it on board the P. & O. steamship _Ganges_, in Tilbury Dock, when Constantine gave him a gold watch and chain. The watch was ticking in his waistcoat pocket at that very moment, but the chain, being of a size that provoked caustic undergraduate humor, lay in a drawer. “Bad luck! There’s no such thing, _amigo mio_! Bad management? Yes, it abounds, but, where women are concerned, I flatter myself that I know the sex. Fair, frail, and fickle, dark, deep, and _da capo_--that’s how I classify ’em.” This new voice was that of an unctuous devil. Grier, with his finely tuned ear for vocal effects, fancied that a boa-constrictor might speak with such a voice. It was the oil in the man-olive which gave his speech its smoothness. Steindal laughed softly at his own cheap wit, but Constantine was not amused.