“No. I only heard vaguely, as one might hear violent words and the sound of blows through a thin partition. When the ’cello began to play the lament of Vulcan, I suddenly understood that a great many mythological attributes of gods and goddesses must have arisen from a more or less accurate perception by studious ancients of unknown or, rather, little-used human powers. But why are you smiling? Is that a very old discovery?” “It becomes newer every day. Forgive me, Miss Hutchinson. I was really congratulating myself on my own perspicacity. I was sure that the words, as well as the music, had affected you.” “But why am I so helpless against these attacks?” she murmured, pathetically. “What is this man, Constantine, to me that his voice should sound in my ears though half the earth intervenes?” Her eyes became suspiciously limpid, but she lifted her head defiantly. “Why should I dread him, too?” she cried. “It seems, somehow, that were it not for him I should not have met you and Karl. There can be no doubt that we should not have met so soon. And, with you two to help, it should certainly be an easy matter to circumvent Constantine.” “Is it placing too great a strain on you to ask what you have heard?” She bent nearer. Almost a child in years, she seemed to be changing into a woman--with all a woman’s passion and capacity for endurance--changing even while we sat there amidst the babel of talk in many a foreign tongue, with the tender voluptuous plaint of the waltz beating like a heart in rhythmic diapason. “This is the time I grow frightened of myself,” she said, with a wistful little smile. “Just now I was afraid on Karl’s behalf. I wish--and yet I do not wish--that some one else were favored with these visions. Sometimes they are--quite--thrilling. But this one thrilled me in an exceedingly unpleasant way. Have you seen Sarah Bernhardt in that awful play, wherein she hears her lover being tortured to make him confess a secret which she knows? Well, I felt something like that when I came to a knowledge of my whereabouts. What time is it now in New York?” I glanced at my watch. It was 9.30 P.M. “A little after four o’clock in the afternoon,” I said. “Then Constantine is in his office. He deals in grain, among other things. One day he explained to me the manner in which a silver currency in Russia and India affects the business done on a gold standard in Canada and the States. Sometimes his agents are instructed to buy above the market rate so as to equalize quotations. He is reputed to be a very clever financier.” “You know him fairly well?” I asked. There was never a woman born who could tell a story without parentheses. These side issues are as essential to her recital as gussets to a dress. “I have met him several times. I must confess he was interesting until he asked me to marry him.” “Oh, he reached that stage?”