As to the story of the Orpheus and its inventor, both girls hung upon it. Falloden had tracked Auguste Chaumart to his garret in Montmartre, and had found in him one of those marvellous French workmen, inheritors of the finest technical tradition in the world, who are the true sons of the men who built and furnished and carved Versailles, and thereby revolutionised the minor arts of Europe. A small pinched fellow!—with a sickly wife and children sharing his tiny workshop, and a brain teeming with inventions, of which the electric piano, forerunner of the Welte-Mignons of later days, was but the chief among many. He had spent a fortune upon it, could get no capitalist to believe in it, and no firm to take it up. Then Falloden’s astonishing letter and offer of funds, based on Radowitz’s report—itself the echo of a couple of letters from Paris—had encouraged the starving dreamer to go on. Falloden reproduced the scene, as described to him by the chief actor in it, when the inventor announced to his family that the thing was accomplished, the mechanism perfect, and how that very night they should hear Chopin’s great Fantasia, Op. 49, played by its invisible hands. The moment came. Wife and children gathered, breathless. Chaumart turned on the current, released the machinery. “_Ecoutez, mes enfants! Ecoutez, Henriette_!” They listened—with ears, with eyes, with every faculty strained to its utmost. And nothing happened!—positively nothing—beyond a few wheezing or creaking sounds. The haggard inventor in despair chased everybody out of the room, and sat looking at the thing, wondering whether to smash it, or kill himself. Then an idea struck him. In feverish haste he took the whole mechanism to pieces again, sitting up all night. And as the morning sun rose, he discovered in the very heart of the creature, to which by now he attributed an uncanny and independent life, the most elementary blunder—a vital connection missed between the power-supplying mechanism and the cylinders containing the records. He set it right; and nearly dead with fatigue and excitement, unlocked his door, and called his family back. Then what triumph! What falling on each other’s necks—and what a _déjeuner_ in the Palais Royal—children and all—paid for by the inventor’s last napoleon! All this Falloden told, and told well. Connie could not restrain her pleasure as he came to the end of his tale. She clapped her hands in delight. “And when—when will it come!” “I think Christmas will see it here. I’ve only told you half—and the lesser half. It’s you that have done most—far the most.”