“Solicitude for your health, dear sir,” she replied, smiling.  “At Bayreuth I met that quaint person, Mrs. Sullivan Smith, who told me that you were still here with Mr. Foster; and to-day, as I was travelling from Cologne to Ostend, the idea suddenly occurred to me to spend one night at Bruges, and make inquiries into your condition—­and that of Mr. Foster.  You know the papers have been publishing the most contradictory accounts.”

“Have they indeed?” laughed Alresca.

But I could see that he was nervous and not at ease.  For myself, I was, it must be confessed, enchanted to see Rosa again, and so unexpectedly, and it was amazingly nice of her to include myself in her inquiries, and yet I divined that it would have been better if she had never come.  I had a sense of some sort of calamity.

Alresca was flushed.  He spoke in short, hurried sentences.  Alternately his tones were passionate and studiously cold.  Rosa’s lovely presence, her musical chatter, her gay laughter, filled the room.  She seemed to exhale a delightful and intoxicating atmosphere, which spread itself through the chamber and enveloped the soul of Alresca.  It was as if he fought against an influence, and then gradually yielded to the sweetness of it.  I observed him closely—­for was he not my patient?—­and I guessed that a struggle was passing within him.  I thought of what he had just been saying to me, and I feared lest the strong will should be scarcely so strong as it had deemed itself.

“You have dined?” asked Alresca.

“I have eaten,” she said.  “One does not dine after a day’s travelling.”

“Won’t you have some coffee?”

She consented to the coffee, which Alexis John Smedley duly brought in, and presently she was walking lightly to and fro, holding the tiny white cup in her white hand, and peering at the furniture and bric-a-brac by the light of several candles.  Between whiles she related to Alresca all the news of their operatic acquaintances—­how this one was married, another stranded in Buenos Ayres, another ill with jealousy, another ill with a cold, another pursued for debt, and so on through the diverting category.

“And Smart?” Alresca queried at length.

I had been expecting and hoping for this question.

“Oh, Sir Cyril!  I have heard nothing of him.  He is not a person that interests me.”

She shut her lips tight and looked suddenly across in my direction, and our eyes met, but she made no sign that I could interpret.  If she had known that the little jewelled dagger lay in the room over her head!

Her straw hat and thin white veil lay on a settee between two windows.  She picked them up, and began to pull the pins out of the hat.  Then she put the hat down again.

“I must run away soon, Alresca,” she said, bending over him, “but before I leave I should like to go through the whole house.  It seems such a quaint place.  Will you let Mr. Foster show me?  He shall not be away from you long.”