had changed.  Such people as the Averys, the Cravens and the Byrnes, who in a social way had known Paula well, seemed to regard her now as a personage utterly remote, translated into another world altogether.  And when they asked about John Wollaston, as most of them did, there was an undertone almost of commiseration about their inquiries, though on the surface this didn’t go beyond an expressed regret that he hadn’t been here to witness the triumph.

Mary drove them all away at last, even the lingerers in Paula’s dressing-room, left her safely in the hands of her dresser and went out into the automobile park to get her car.  Coming up softly across the grass and reaching in to turn on the lights, she was startled to discover that there was a man in it.  But before she had time more than to gasp, she recognized him as her father.

“I didn’t want to push my way in with the mob,” he explained, after apologizing for having frightened her.  “The car, when I spotted it, seemed a safe place to wait.  And the privacy of it,” he added, “will be grateful, too, since I’m not perfectly sure that Paula won’t refuse outright to see me.”

Mary smiled at this and said she hoped he hadn’t missed the performance.

“No,” he told her somberly, “I didn’t miss—­any of it.”  Then on a different note, “Now we’ll see whether those dogs of critics won’t change their tune.”

“Paula herself changed the tune,” Mary observed.  Then, “She’s longing to see you, of course.  And there’s no reason why you should wait.  No one’s with her now except her dresser.”

She led the way, without giving him a chance to demur, to the gate to the stockade and turned him over to the gatekeeper.

“Please take Doctor Wollaston up to his wife’s dressing-room,” she said.  And with a momentary pleasure in having evaded introducing him as Madame Carresford’s husband, she turned away and went back to the car.

For the moment the spectacle of her father in the role of a young lover touched her no more acutely than with a mild half-humorous melancholy.  She even paid the tribute of a passing smile to the queer reversal of their roles, her own and his.  She was more like a mother brooding over the first love-affair of an adolescent son.  It was so young of him, younger, she believed, than any act she herself could be capable of, to have come to Paula’s performance without letting her know and waited shyly alone in the dark while the herd of her acquaintances crowded in and monopolized her.  Pathetically young, almost intolerably pathetic in a man in his middle fifties.  She wondered if he had come up for Tosca the night before and gone away without a word.

She had spoken quite without authority in assuring him of Paula’s welcome.  Paula had not, she thought, spoken of him once either in connection with her disappointment the night before or with her triumph to-night.  Yet that he would get a lover’s welcome she had very little doubt.  It was his moment certainly.  Paula left alone up there at last, sated with an overwhelming success, tired, relaxed...