‘Now!’ he said.  ‘That door to the left.’

Kendal, catching the signal, rose from his seat behind Madame de Chateauvieux and bent forward.  The great door at the end of the palace had slowly opened, and gliding through it with drooping head and hands clasped before her came Elvira, followed by her little maid Beatriz.  The storm which greeted her appearance was such as thrilled the pulses of the oldest habitue in the theatre.  Tears came to Madame de Chateauvieux’s eyes, and she looked up at her brother.

’What a scene!  It is overpowering—­it is too much for her!  I wish they would let her go on!’

Kendal made no answer, his soul was in his eyes; he had no senses for any but one person. She was there, within a few yards of him, in all the sovereignty of her beauty and her fame, invested with the utmost romance that circumstances could bestow, and about, if half he heard were true, to reap a great artistic, no less than a great personal triumph.  Had he felt towards her only as the public felt it would have been an experience beyond the common run, and as it was—­oh, this aching, intolerable sense of desire, of separation, of irremediable need!  Was that her voice?  He had heard that tone of despair in it before—­under over-arching woods, when the June warmth was in the air!  That white outstretched hand had once lain close clasped in his own; those eyes had once looked with a passionate trouble into his.  Ah, it was gone for ever, nothing would ever recall it—­that one quick moment of living contact!  In a deeper sense than met the ear, she was on the stage and he among the audience.  To the end his gray life would play the part of spectator to hers, or else she would soon have passed beyond his grasp and touch, just as Elvira would have vanished in a little while from the sight of the great audience which now hung upon her every movement.

Then from the consciousness of his own private smart he was swept out, whether he would or no, into the general current of feeling which was stirring the multitude of human beings around him, and he found himself gradually mastered by considerations of a different order altogether.  Was this the actress he had watched with such incessant critical revolt six months before?  Was this the half-educated girl, grasping at results utterly beyond her realisation, whom he remembered?

It seemed to him impossible that this quick artistic intelligence, this nervous understanding of the demands made upon her, this faculty in meeting them, could have been developed by the same Isabel Bretherton whose earlier image was so distinctly graven on his memory.  And yet his trained eye learned after a while to decipher in a hundred indications the past history of the change.  He saw how she had worked, and where; the influences which had been brought to bear upon her were all familiar to him; they had been part of his own training, and they belonged, as he