“But your friend?  But your friend?” cried she.

Audrey, being led gradually into the drawing-room, explained that Miss Ingate had been prevented at the last moment, etc., etc.

The distinction of Madame Foa’s simple dress had reassured Audrey to a certain extent, but the size of the drawing-room disconcerted her again.  She had understood that the house of the Foas was the real esoteric centre of musical Paris, and she had prepared herself for vast and luxurious salons, footmen, fountains of wine, rare flowers, dandies, and the divine shoulders of operatic sopranos who combined wit with the most seductive charm.  The drawing-room of the Foas was not as large as her own drawing-room at the Danube.  Still it was full, and double doors leading to an unseen dining-room at right angles to its length produced an illusion of space.  Some of the men and some of the women were elegant, and even very elegant; others were not.  Audrey instantly with her expert eye saw that the pictures on the walls were of the last correctness, and a few by illustrious painters.  Here and there she could see scrawled on them “a mon ami, Andre Foa.”  Such phenomena were balm.  Everybody in the room was presented to her, and with the greatest particularity, and the host and hostess gazed on her as on an idol, a jewel, an exquisite and startling discovery.  Musa found two men he knew.  The conversation was resumed with energy.

“And now,” said Madame Foa in English, sitting down intimately beside Audrey, with a loving gesture, “We will have a little talk, you and I. I find our friend Madame Piriac met you last year.”

“Ah!  Yes,” murmured Audrey, fatally struck, but admirably dissembling, for she was determined to achieve the evening successfully.  “Madame Piriac, will she come to-night?”

“I fear not,” replied Madame Foa.  “She would if she could.”

“I should so like to have seen her again,” said Audrey eagerly.  She was so relieved at Madame Piriac’s not coming that she felt she could afford to be eager.

And Monsieur Foa, a little distance off, threw a sign into the duologue, and called: 

“You permit me?  Your dress ... Exquise!  Exquise! And these pigs of French persist in saying that the English lack taste!” He clapped his hand to his forehead in despair of the French.

Then the clanging sound supervened, and the little fox-terrier yapped, and Monsieur Foa went out, ejaculating “Ah!” and Madame Foa went into the doorway.  Audrey glanced round for Musa, but he was out of sight in the dining-room.  Several people turned at once and spoke to her, including two composers who had probably composed more impossibilities for amateur pianists than any other two men who ever lived, and a musical critic with large dark eyes and an Eastern air, who had come from the Opera very sarcastic about the Opera.  One of the composers asked the critic whether he had not heard Musa play.