"Well, then--the new Puccini is there!" She nodded toward the music-shelves, and he turned to the new score with an eager exclamation. Fifteen minutes later she had to scold him to bring him to the fire again, and to the smoking little supper. While Alice sipped ginger ale, Christopher fell upon his meal, and they discussed the probable presentation of the opera, and its quality. But an hour later, when she was in bed, and Christopher was going back to the piano for another half-hour of music, she caught his hand. "Chris, you're not worried about this Sheridan matter?" "Worried? No, dearest child, what is there to worry about? It isn't blackmail, apparently it's nothing but an overdose of imagination on your mother's part. If the girl really was promised something, or has--for example!--old stock, or if her father was an employee who did this or that or the other--Mrs. Sheridan's husband was employed by your father at the time of his death, by the way--why, it's easy enough to pay the claim, whatever it is! The girl seems to have made a nice impression--your mother tells me she's sold me books, but that doesn't mean much, I buy books everywhere! No, I don't think you'll ever hear of her again. But your mother will be here in a day or two; see what you can make of it all!" "Oh, of course, it's nothing _wrong_!" Alice said, confidently. And Christopher returned to his beloved piano, relieved in mind by his wife's counsel, refreshed in body by the impromptu supper, and ready for the music that soothed in him all the restless and unsatisfied fibres of his soul. CHAPTER IV Annie, who signed herself "Anne Melrose von Behrens," was the real dictator in the various circles of the allied families, and had a fashion of finding herself supreme in larger circles, as well. Annie was thirty-seven or eight, tall, thin, ash-blonde, superb in manner and bearing. Nature had been generous to her, but she had done far more for herself than Nature had. Her matchless skin, her figure, her hands, her voice, were all the result of painstaking and intelligent care. Annie had been a headstrong, undisciplined girl twenty years ago. She had come back from a European visit, at twenty-three, with a vague if general reputation of being "a terror." But Annie was clever, and she had real charm. She spoke familiarly of European courts, had been presented even in inaccessible Vienna. She spoke languages, quoted poets, had great writers and painters for her friends, and rippled through songs that had been indisputably dedicated, in flowing foreign hands, to the beautiful Mademoiselle Melrose. Society bowed before Annie; she was the sensation of her winter, and the marriage she promptly made was the most brilliant in many winters.