Meanwhile Connie very rarely saw Falloden—except in connection either with Otto’s health, or with the “Orpheus,” as to which Falloden was in constant communication with the inventor, one Auguste Chaumart, living in a garret on the heights of Montmartre; while Constance herself was carrying on an eager correspondence with friends of her own or her parents, in Paris, with regard to the “records” which were to make the repertory of the Orpheus. The automatic piano—or piano-player—which some years later became the pianola, was in those days rapidly developing. The difference between it and the Orpheus lay in the fact that the piano-player required hands and feet of flesh and blood for anything more than a purely mechanical rendering of the music provided by the rolls; while in the Orpheus, expression, accent, interpretation, as given by the best pianists of the day, had been already registered in the cylinders. On the pianola, or what preceded it—then as now—the player provided his own rendering. But the Orpheus, the precursor also of types that have since been greatly perfected, was played by an electrical mechanism, and the audience was intended to listen to Chopin or Beethoven, to Schumann or Brahms, as interpreted by the famous players of the moment, without any intervening personality. These things are very familiar to our generation. In the eighties, they were only a vision and a possibility, and Falloden’s lavish expenditure was in fact stimulating one of the first inventors. But Connie also was playing an important part. Both Lord and Lady Risborough had possessed devoted friends in Paris, and Connie had made others of her own among the young folk with whom she had danced and flirted and talked during a happy spring with her parents in the Avenue Marceau. She had set these playfellows of hers to work, and with most brilliant success. Otto’s story, as told by her vivacious letters, had gone the round. No woman of twice her age could have told it more adroitly. Otto appeared as the victim of an unfortunate accident in a college frolic; Falloden as the guardian friend; herself, as his lieutenant. It touched the romantic sense, the generous heart of musical Paris. There were many who remembered Otto’s father and mother and the musical promise of the bright-haired boy. The Polish colony in Paris, a survival from the tragic days of Poland’s exodus under the revolutionary skies of the thirties and the sixties, had been appealed to, and both Polish and French musicians were already in communication with Chaumart, and producing records under his direction. The young Polish marvel of the day—Paderewski—had been drawn in, and his renderings of Chopin’s finest work were to provide the bulk of the rolls. Connie’s dear old Polish teacher, himself a composer, was at work on a grouping of folk-songs from Poland and Lithuania—the most characteristic utterance of a martyred people.