Oddly enough, in a brief flash of silence, "entre la poire et le fromage," they heard a foreigner at an adjoining table (one of a very noisy group) exclaim: "Mais quand je vous dis que j'l'ai entendue, moi, la Svengali! et même qu'elle a chanté l'Impromptu de Chopin absolument comme si c'était un piano qu'on jouait! voyons!..."
"Farceur! la bonne blague!" said another—and then the conversation became so noisily general it was no good listening any more.
"Svengali! how funny that name should turn up! I wonder what's become of our Svengali, by-the-way?" observed Taffy.
"I remember his playing Chopin's Impromptu," said Little Billee; "what a singular coincidence!"
There were to be more coincidences that night; it never rains them but it pours!
So our three friends finished their coffee and liqueured up, and went to Cornelys's, three in a hansom—
"Like Mars,
A-smokin' their poipes and cigyars."
Sir Louis Cornelys, as everybody knows, lives in a palace on Campden Hill, a house of many windows; and whichever window he looks out of, he sees his own garden and very little else. In spite of his eighty years, he works as hard as ever, and his hand has lost but little of its cunning. But he no longer gives those splendid parties that made him almost as famous a host as he was an artist.
When his beautiful wife died he shut himself up from the world; and now he never stirs out of his house and grounds except to fulfil his duties at the Royal Academy and dine once a year with the Queen.