The Primadonna | Page 9

doctor said?'
'He said she died of failure of the heart, from shock. Those were his
words. Why do you ask?'
'Mere curiosity. I helped to carry her--that is, I carried her myself to the
manager's room, and she begged me to call you, so I came to your
door.'
'It was kind of you. Perhaps it made a difference to her, poor girl.
Good-night.'
'Good-night. When do you sail?'
'On Saturday. I sing "Juliet" on Friday night and sail the next morning.'
'On the _Leofric_?'
'Yes.'
'So do I. We shall cross together.'
'How delightful! I'm so glad! Good-night again.'
Alphonsine was standing at the open door of the dressing-room in the

bright light, and Margaret nodded and went in. The maid looked after
the elderly man till he finally disappeared, and then she went in too and
locked the door after her.
Griggs walked home in the bitter March weather. When he was in New
York, he lived in rooms on the second floor of an old business building
not far from Fifth Avenue. He was quite alone in the house at night,
and had to walk up the stairs by the help of a little electric
pocket-lantern he carried. He let himself into his own door, turned up
the light, slipped off his overcoat and gloves, and went to the
writing-table to get his pipe. That is very often the first thing a man
does when he gets home at night.
The old briar pipe he preferred to any other lay on the blotting-paper in
the circle where the light was brightest. As he took it a stain on his right
hand caught his eye, and he dropped the pipe to look at it. The blood
was dark and was quite dry, and he could not find any scratch to
account for it. It was on the inner side of his right hand, between the
thumb and forefinger, and was no larger than an ordinary watch.
'How very odd!' exclaimed Mr. Griggs aloud; and he turned his hand
this way and that under the electric lamp, looking for some small
wound which he supposed must have bled. There was a little more
inside his fingers, and between them, as if it had oozed through and
then had spread over his knuckles.
But he could find nothing to account for it. He was an elderly man who
had lived all over the world and had seen most things, and he was not
easily surprised, but he was puzzled now. Not the least strange thing
was that the stain should be as small as it was and yet so dark. He
crossed the room again and examined the front of his overcoat with the
most minute attention. It was made of a dark frieze, almost black, on
which a red stain would have shown very little; but after a very careful
search Griggs was convinced that the blood which had stained his hand
had not touched the cloth.
He went into his dressing-room and looked at his face in his
shaving-glass, but there was certainly no stain on the weather-beaten

cheeks or the furrowed forehead.
'How very odd!' he exclaimed a second time.
He washed his hands slowly and carefully, examining them again and
again, for he thought it barely possible that the skin might have been
cracked somewhere by the cutting March wind, and might have bled a
little, but he could not find the least sign of such a thing.
When he was finally convinced that he could not account for the stain
he had now washed off, he filled his old pipe thoughtfully and sat down
in a big shabby arm-chair beside the table to think over other questions
more easy of solution. For he was a philosophical man, and when he
could not understand a matter he was able to put it away in a safe place,
to be kept until he got more information about it.
The next morning, amidst the flamboyant accounts of the subterranean
explosion, and of the heroic conduct of Madame Margarita da Cordova,
the famous Primadonna, in checking a dangerous panic at the Opera, all
the papers found room for a long paragraph about Miss Ida H.
Bamberger, who had died at the theatre in consequence of the shock her
nerves had received, and who was to have married the celebrated
capitalist and philanthropist, Mr. Van Torp, only two days later. There
were various dramatic and heart-rending accounts of her death, and
most of them agreed that she had breathed her last amidst her nearest
and dearest, who had been with her all the evening.
But Mr. Griggs read these paragraphs thoughtfully, for he remembered
that he had found her lying in a heap behind a red baize door which his
memory