IV
And summer passed. With this woman of flesh and blood in his arms, all thought of the phantom woman had faded from his mind.
So it was with a shock of something more than surprise, on unfolding his newspaper one morning, that he saw before him, black on white, the name he would once have given all he had to see. Now, his first impulse was mentally to jump away from it. With a quick glance at his companion, he turned over and crumpled up the sheet. But as soon as she had left the room he went back to it, and smoothed it out. What if his eyes had played him false? But there it stood: an announcement that the singer, Bianca Josefa del Sanseverina, would perform at a certain cafe, in the city of M., on such and such an evening.
He threw the paper from him and laughed. He could afford to
