She looked magnificent in a dress of cream satin, which showed off her beautiful neck and the exquisite poise of her head to great advantage. She wore no jewels, but half-a-dozen roses of different colours were arranged on the front of her dress, and another was placed upright on one side of her head and worn as an aigrette. Long white suède gloves completed the costume, and Bayre thought that he had never seen so beautiful a woman, and was glad Southerley was not there to have his chains further riveted.
He became quite anxious to hear her sing, and was not in the least surprised at the burst of applause which greeted her as soon as she came to the front of the platform. It seemed to him that if her voice proved to be as superb as her appearance she was wasting herself at Bromley.
But with the first bars of the song came not exactly disenchantment, but a decidedly modified appreciation of the beauty’s art. She had a good voice, not in the first rank, but pleasant to listen to; the weakness of her performance lay in the fact that her voice had not been sufficiently cultivated, and that she was possessed by an overpowering nervousness which, while it rather added to her charm as a woman, decidedly marred her efforts as a singer.
In brief she had, though singing as a “professional,” scarcely got beyond the stage of “gifted amateur.”
But her beauty, her modesty, her statuesque grace, carried all before them, and the audience applauded her as if she had been Patti herself.
Bayre began now to understand that Madame Nicolas had mixed up in her mind what she had heard about one woman with what she had heard about another, and he resolved, now that he was in for it, to run Signora Beata to earth.
He found the rest of the concert tedious, except when the beauty was on the platform, and as soon as her last appearance on the programme was made he slipped out of his seat and went outside to wait for her.
She fled out of the building so quickly and so quietly, however, that he was not able to speak to her, and he got into the same train, but not into the same carriage, and then when he had seen her enter an omnibus he got on the top of the vehicle, determined to track her down.
She alighted finally at that part of London which used to be known as Brompton, but which has since, by the profuse use of the name “Egerton” instead of the older and homelier ones, purged away the Brompton taint and become something far higher in the social scale.
Here Bayre followed the lady into a side street where little cards over the door announced “Apartments,” and at one of these she stopped and proceeded to open it with a latch-key.