“Let’s sit it out, here,” Florian exclaimed in the smoking-room. The folding doors stood open, so that all might hear; but their group sat a little apart—Will, Rue, and he—in the farther corner, away from the draught, and out of sight of the musicians. “It’s more comfortable so—just the family by itself; and besides, I’ve a theory of my own that one should hear the zither through an open door; it mitigates and modifies the metallic twang of the instrument.” Will and Rue were all acquiescence. Next to a _tête-à-tête_, a _parti-à-trois_ is the pleasantest form of society. So they kept their seats still, in the rocking-chairs by the corner, and let the sound float idly in to them through the open portal. Linnet waited, all trembling. Thank heaven, it wasn’t her part to begin. Franz Lindner came first with a solo on the zither. Bold, confident, defiant, with his hat stuck a little on one side of his head, and his feather in his band, turned Robbler-wise, wrong way, quite as jaunty as ever, Franz faced his audience as if his life had been passed in first-class hotels, and an Edison light had been the lamp of his childhood. Nothing daunted or disconcerted by the novelty of the circumstances, he played his piece through with a certain reckless brilliancy, wholly in keeping with the keynote of the Tyrolese character. Florian observed outside, with connoiseur complacency, that the fellow had _brio_. But the audience went on unmoved with its _Times_ and its _Tagblatt_. The audience was chilling; Franz Lindner, accustomed to his own mercurial and magnetic fellow-countrymen, could hardly understand it. His self-love was mortified. He had expected a triumph, a sudden burst of wild applause; he received instead a faint clap of the hands from Ethel and Eva, and an encouraging nod from the mercantile gentleman of nonconformist exterior. Franz sat down—a smouldering and seething volcano. Then came Linnet’s turn. She rose, all tremulous, in her pretty costume, with her beautiful face and her shrinking timidity. Old gentlemen peeped askance over the edge of their papers at the good-looking girl; young ladies took stock of her abundant black hair and her dainty kerchief. “She’s going to sing,” Ethel whispered. “Isn’t she pretty, Eva? And just look, how very odd, she’s got a necklet exactly like the ones Mrs Palmer gave us!”