"It would be nice if you brought along to-day all you have done of the libretto and read it to us." He stood by the piano and struck a couple of chords.
"What's that?" asked Heinrich.
"A theme," replied George "that's just occurred to me for the second act. It is meant to accompany the moment in which the remarkable stranger appears on the ship."
Heinrich shut the window, George sat down and started to go on playing. There was a knock at the door, and Heinrich automatically cried: "Come in."
A young lady came in in a light cloth skirt with a red silk blouse and a white velvet ribbon with a little gold cross round her neck. A Florentine hat trimmed with roses shaded with its broad brim the pale little face from which two big black eyes peered out.
"Good afternoon," said the strange lady in a low voice, which sounded at the same time both defiant and embarrassed. "Excuse me, Herr Bermann, I didn't know that you had visitors," and she looked inquisitively at George, who had at once recognised her.
Heinrich grew paler and puckered his forehead. "I certainly had no idea," he began. He then introduced them and said to the lady: "Won't you sit down?"
"Thanks," she answered curtly and remained standing. "Perhaps I'll come again later."
"Please don't," cut in George. "I am just on the point of running off."
He watched the look of the actress roving round the room and felt a strange pity for her, such as one frequently feels in dreams for dead people who do not know that they have died. He then saw Heinrich's glance rest on this pale little face with inconceivable hardness. He now remembered very clearly seeing her on the stage, with the reddish-blonde hair that fell over her forehead and her roving eyes. "That's not how persons look," he thought, "who are fated to belong only to one man. And to think of Heinrich, who plumes himself so much on his knowledge of character, never having felt that! What did he really want of her? It was vanity which burnt in his soul, nothing more than vanity."