Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/137

 music but she could not place it. The voice of the soprano was young. It sang a little uncertainly.

Newport. What was Newport like now? Who lived in the old house with the ugly stone turrets? Her room had been the one in the turret above the porte cochère. . . the room she had left to marry Faustino, Principe d'Orobelli, Conte di Venterollo. Well, it had sounded splendid enough to suit her mother—her mother, who was having an affair with a dentist years younger than herself. Wilkins was his name, Herbert Wilkins. We are bad blood (she thought). But there were plenty of other girls willing to take her place. Faustino was getting money and she was becoming a Princess—Princess d'Orobelli. A fool she was, knowing nothing about anything. . . nothing about life. Thank God, girls today were different, especially American girls; they knew what they were doing.

There was another motor coming across the bridge. It wasn't Oreste. It was a camion, rumbling and rattling through the stillness of the night.

"I mustn't watch for him," she thought. "If I watch it will only make him later."

The voice belowstairs kept on singing. She knew the music now. It was the Rosenkavalier—the music of the Feldmarschallin in the first act. The voice was singing in French and not too good French. Probably an American girl studying in Italy. A Viennese opera sung in French by an American in Brinoë. The world was getting like that. She, an American married to an Italian, had a Spanish lover. What did it matter? What did anything matter except staying young, like that fresh