Mr Franz Lindner, alias Signor Francesco of the London Pavilion, laid down his morning paper at his lodgings in Soho, with unmistakable outward and visible signs of a very bad humour. Montepulciano and Lacrima-Christi, as Florian put it, had evidently disagreed with him. But that was not all. The subject which roused his undisguised discontent was the marked success of the woman he once loved?—?the woman he loved now even more than ever.

For this was what Franz had read, amid much else of the same cheap laudatory strain, in the theatrical column of the Daily Telephone.

“The first performance of Mr W. Deverill’s new English opera, Cophetua’s Adventure, at the Harmony last night marks an epoch in the renascence of the poetical drama in England. Never has the little house on the Embankment been so crowded before; never has an audience received a new play with more unanimous marks of profound enthusiasm. Both as a work of literature and as a musical composition, this charming piece recalls to mind the best days of the great Italian outburst of song at the beginning of the century.” Franz snorted internally as he ran his eye in haste over the learned digression on the various characteristics of the various operas which Cophetua’s Adventure suggested to the accomplished critic who works the drama for that leading newspaper. Then, skipping the gag, he read on once more with deeper interest, “It would be hard to decide whether the chief honours of the night belonged more unmistakably to Mr Deverill himself or to his charming exponent, Signora Casalmonte. The words of the songs, indeed, possessed to a rare degree high literary merit; the music, as might be expected from so accomplished a composer, was light and airy, yet with the genuine ring of artistic inspiration; but the ever-delightful soprano rendered her part so admirably that ’twas difficult to disentangle Mr Deverill’s tunes from the delicious individualisation conferred upon them by Signora Casalmonte’s voice and acting. The prima donna’s first appearance on the stage as the Beggar Maid, lightly clad in a graceful though ostentatiously simple costume, was the signal for a burst of irrepressible applause from stalls, boxes, and gallery. In the second act, as Cophetua’s Queen, the popular diva looked, if possible, even more enchantingly beautiful; while the exquisite na?veté with which she sang the dainty aria, ‘Now all ye maidens, matrons, wives, and widows,’ brought down the house in one prolonged outburst of unmixed appreciation. Our operatic stage has seldom boasted a lady so perfectly natural, in manner, gesture, and action, or one who allowed her great native gifts to degenerate so little into affectations or prettinesses.”

Franz flung down the paper and sighed. He admitted it; he regretted it. What a fool he had been not to marry that girl, offhand, when he once had the chance, instead of dawdling and hanging about till Hausberger carried the prize off under his nose to St Valentin. It was disgusting, it was silly of him! And now it began to strike him very forcibly indeed that his chance, once gone, was gone for ever. A full year and more had passed since Linnet and her husband first came to London. During that year it had dawned slowly upon Franz’s mind that Linnet had risen into a higher sphere, and could never by any possibility be his in future. He was dimly conscious by this time that he himself was a music-hall gentleman by nature and position, while Linnet was born to be a special star of the higher opera. Never could he recover the ground thus lost; the woman he loved once, and now loved again distractedly, had climbed to a higher plane, and was lost to his horizon.

What annoyed Franz more than anything, however, was his feeling of chagrin that he had let himself be cajoled, on the night of Linnet’s first appearance in London, into abandoning his designs against her husband’s person. He knew now he had done wrong; he ought to have stabbed Andreas Hausberger, then and there, as he intended. In a moment of culpable weakness, he had allowed himself to be beguiled from his fixed purpose by the blandishments of Linnet and the rich American widow. That would indeed have been the dramatic time to strike; he had let the psychological moment go by unheeded, and it would never return, or, at least, it would never return in so effectual a fashion. To have struck him then and there, on their very first meeting after Linnet’s marriage, and on the night when Linnet made her earliest bow before an English audience?—?that would have been splendid, that would have been beautiful, that would have been romantic: all London would have rung with it. But now, during those past months, he had met Andreas twice or thrice, on neutral ground, as it were, and the relations between them, though distant and distinctly strained, had been nominally friendly. The Robbler felt he had committed a fatal error in accepting Mr Will’s invitation to supper on that critical evening. It had compelled him to treat Andreas as an acquaintance once more; to turn round upon him now, and stab him in pure pique, would be feeble and self-stultifying. Franz wished he had had strength of mind to resist the women’s wiles that first night at the Harmony, and to draw his rival’s blood before their very eyes, as his own better judgment had told him he ought to do.

He had seen Linnet, too, and there came the unkindest cut of all; for he recognised at once that the girl he had described to Will Deverill as beneath his exalted notice since he rose to the front ranks of the profession at the London Pavilion, was now so much above him that she scarcely thought of him at all, and evidently regarded him only in the light of the man who had threatened her husband’s life when they came to England.

Yes; Linnet thought nothing of him now; how could you expect it to be otherwise? She had money and rank and position at her feet; was it likely, being a woman, she would care greatly, when things were thus, for a music-hall singer who earned as much in six months as she herself could earn in one easy fortnight? And yet . . . Franz rose, and gazed abstractedly at his own face in the glass over the mantelpiece. No fault to find there! Many women did worse. He was excellently pleased with his black moustache, his flashing dark eyes, his well-turned figure; he even thought not ill of his blazing blue necktie. And Andreas was fifty if he was a day, Franz felt sure; old Andreas with his solid cut, his square-set shoulders, his steely-grey eyes, his heavy, unimpassioned, inexpressive countenance! Ach, if only he himself had the money to cut a dash?—?the mere wretched rhino?—?the miserable oof?—?for Franz had lived long enough in England now to have picked up a choice collection of best British slang?—?he might stand a chance still against that creature Andreas!

It was one o’clock by this time, though Franz had only just risen from his morning coffee. What would you have? A professional man must needs sing till late at night, and take his social pleasures at his café afterwards. So Franz was seldom in bed till two or three in the morning, recouping himself next day by sleeping on till mid-day. ’Twas the hour of the promenade. He went into his bedroom, doffed his flannel smoking-coat, and arrayed himself in the cheaply-fashionable broad............