“We cannot stop at this hotel; we must have a house.  I have heard of a charming hotel in the Rue Balzac.”

“In the Rue Balzac!  Is there a street called after him?  Is it on account of the name you want me to live there?”

“No; I don’t think so, but perhaps the name had something to do with it—­one never knows.  But I always liked the street.”

“Which of his books is it like?”

“Les Secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan”

They laughed and kissed each other.

“At the bottom of the street is the Avenue de Friedland; the tram passes there, and it will take you straight to Madame Savelli’s.”

The sparrows had begun to shrill in the courtyard, and their eyes ached with sleep.

“Five or six years—­you’ll be at the height of your fame.  They will pass only too quickly,” he added.

He was thinking what his age would be then.  “And when they have passed, it will seem like a dream.”

“Like a dream,” she repeated, and she laid her face on the pillow where his had lain.

CHAPTER TWELVE

As she lay between sleeping and waking, she strove to grasp the haunting, fugitive idea, but shadows of sleep fell, and in her dream there appeared two Tristans, a fair and a dark.  When the shadows were lifted and she thought with an awakening brain, she smiled at the absurdity, and, striving to get close to her idea, to grip it about its very loins, she asked herself how much of her own life she could express in the part, for she always acted one side of her character.  Her pious girlhood found expression in the Elizabeth, and what she termed the other side of her character she was going to put on the stage in the character of Isolde.  Again sleep thickened, and she found it impossible to follow her idea.  It eluded her; she could not grasp it.  It turned to a dream, a dream which she could not understand even while she dreamed it.  But as she awaked, she uttered a cry.  It happened to be the note she had to sing when the curtain goes up and Isolde lies on the couch yearning for Tristan, for assuagement of the fever which consumes her.  All other actresses had striven to portray an Irish princess, or what they believed an Irish princess might be.  But she cared nothing for the Irish princess, and a great deal for the physical and mental distress of a woman sick with love.

Her power of recalling her sensations was so intense, that in her warm bed she lived again the long, aching evenings of the long winter in Dulwich, before she went away with Owen.  She saw again the Spring twilight in the scrap of black garden, where she used to stand watching the stars.  She remembered the dread craving to worship them, the anguish of remorse and fear on her bed, her visions of distant countries and the gleam of eyes which looked at her through the dead of night.  How miserable she had been in that time—­in those months.  She had