chorus and singers, he drew wave after wave of melody, a full sea of transcendent accords that bathed Sylvia with harmony, filtered through her, penetrating blissfully from fingertips to spine.
Delightedly she turned to Annandale. The visitors had gone. Orr was entering. In his bulldog face was an expression vatic and amused.
“Yes,” he resumed, seating himself at Sylvia’s side, “she is billed as Dellarandi, but I knew her as Marie Leroy.”
Sylvia started, her lips half parted, her eyes dilated with surprise.
Annandale bent forward. “What is it?” he asked.
“Amneris, the contralto. Do you know who she is?”
“I know she is a devilish pretty woman. What about her?”
“She is the girl whose father was the twelfth juror in your case.”
Annandale, who had been standing, literally dropped with astonishment in a chair. But Sylvia was insatiable. She could not ask enough, she could not get the answers quickly enough in reply. Orr, however, knew very little, odds and ends merely that he gathered in the lobby, summarily that the girl had married Tambourini, the music teacher, and was regarded as destined to be one of the great queens of song.
So interested were all three that the third act was barely noticed. It took the melting beauty of the final duo to distract them from the debutante. But the witchery of that aria would distract a moribund. It was with the bewildering loveliness of it in their ears that they moved out from the box.
“ Terra addio! ” Orr repeated from it as they descended the stair.