She drew herself up.  She spoke absolutely without faltering.

“I accepted Sylvanus Power’s terms,” she went on.  “He placed large sums of money in Fink’s hands to run the theatre.  There was a wonderful opening.  You were not interested then or you might have heard of it.  I produced a new play of Clyde Fitch’s.  It was a great triumph.  The house was packed.  Sylvanus Power sat in his box.  It was to be his night.  Through it all I fought like a woman in a nightmare.  I didn’t know what it meant.  I knew hundreds of women who had done in a small way what I was prepared to do magnificently.  In all my acquaintance I think that I scarcely knew one who would have refused to do what I was doing.  And all the time I was in a state of fierce revolt.  I had moments when my life’s ambitions, when New York itself, the Mecca of my dreams, and that marvellous theatre, with its marble and silk, seemed suddenly to dwindle to a miserable, contemptible little doll’s house.  And then again I played, and I felt my soul as I played, and the old dreams swept over me, and I said that it wasn’t anything to do with personal vanity that made me crave for the big gifts of success; that it was my art, and that I must find myself in my art or die.”

The blood was flowing in his veins again.  She was coming back to him.  He was ashamed—­he with his giant load of sin!  His voice trembled with tenderness.

“Go on,” he begged.

“I think that the reason I played that night as though I were inspired was because of the great passionate craving at my heart for forgetfulness, to shut out the memory of that man who sat almost gloomily alone in his box, waiting.  And then, after it was all over, the wonder and the glory of it, he appeared suddenly in my dressing-room, elbowing his way through excited journalists, kicking bouquets of flowers from his path.  We stood for a moment face to face.  He came nearer.  I shrank away.  I was terrified!  He looked at me in cold surprise.

“‘Three minutes,’ he exclaimed, ’to say good-by.  I’m off to China.  Stick at it.  You’ve done well for a start, but remember a New York audience wants holding.  Choose your plays carefully.  Trust Fink.’

“‘You’re going away?’ I almost shrieked.

“He glanced at his watch, leaned over, and kissed me on the forehead.

“‘I’ll barely make that boat,’ he muttered, and rushed out."...

Philip was breathless.  The strange, untold passion of the whole thing was coming to him in waves of wonderful suggestion.

“Finish!” he cried impatiently.  “Finish!”

“That is the end,” she said.  “I played for two years and a half, with scarcely a pause.  Then I came to Europe for a rest and travelled back with you on the Elletania.  Last night I saw Sylvanus Power again for the first time.  Don’t speak.  My story is in two halves.  That is the first.  The second is just one question.  That will come before we reach home...John!” she called.