On the first night that Rita had been entrusted with a part of any consequence—­and this was shortly after the conversation at Romanos—­ she had discovered herself to be in a state of hopeless panic.  All her scheming and fencing would have availed her nothing if she were to break down at the critical moment.  It was an eventuality which Sir Lucien had foreseen, and he seized the opportunity at once of securing a new hold upon the girl and of rendering her more pliable than he had hitherto found her to be.  At this time the idea of marriage had not presented itself to Sir Lucien.

Some hours before the performance he detected her condition of abject fright . . . and from his waistcoat pocket he took a little gold snuff-box.

At first the girl declined to follow advice which instinctively she distrusted, and Sir Lucien was too clever to urge it upon her.  But he glanced casually at his wrist-watch—­and poor Rita shuddered.  The gold box was hidden again in the baronet’s pocket.

To analyze the process which thereupon took place in Rita’s mind would be a barren task, since its result was a foregone conclusion.  Daring ambition rather than any merely abstract virtue was the keynote of her character.  She had rebuffed the advances of Sir Lucien as she had rebuffed others, primarily because her aim in life was set higher than mere success in light comedy.  This she counted but a means to a more desirable end—­a wealthy marriage.  To the achievement of such an alliance the presence of an accepted lover would be an obstacle; and true love Rita Dresden had never known.  Yet, short of this final sacrifice which some women so lightly made, there were few scruples which she was not prepared to discard in furtherance of her designs.  Her morality, then, was diplomatic, for the vice of ambition may sometimes make for virtue.

Rita’s vivacious beauty and perfect self-possession on the fateful night earned her a permanent place in stageland:  Rita Dresden became a “star.”  She had won a long and hard-fought battle; but in avoiding one master she had abandoned herself to another.

The triumph of her debut left her strangely exhausted.  She dreaded the coming of the second night almost as keenly as she had dreaded the ordeal of the first.  She struggled, poor victim, and only increased her terrors.  Not until the clock showed her that in twenty minutes she must make her first entrance did she succumb.  But Sir Lucien’s gold snuff-box lay upon her dressing-table—­and she was trembling.  When at last she heard the sustained note of the oboe in the orchestra giving the pitch to the answering violins, she raised the jewelled lid of the box.

So she entered upon the path which leads down to destruction, and since to conjure with the drug which pharmacists know as methylbenzoyl ecgonine is to raise the demon Insomnia, ere long she found herself exploring strange by-paths in quest of sleep.

By the time that she was entrusted with the leading part in The Maid of the Masque, she herself did not recognize how tenacious was the hold which this fatal habit had secured upon her.  In the company of Sir Lucien Pyne she met other devotees, and for a time came to regard her unnatural mode of existence as something inseparable from the Bohemian life.  To the horrible side of it she was blind.