their attentive ranks stood the radiant figure of the purified Margaret, at whose white feet the red crowd of women, even the majestic Cleopatra and pale voluptuous Venus, sank abashed.  Harps sounded frostily, suggesting that crystal heaven of St. John, in which the beauties we know in nature are ousted by unbreathing jewels, the lifeless pearl and chrysolite.  The air filled with thin and wintry light, that deepened, and began to glow, through lemon to amber and to rose.  The angels swam in it, and then the huge stairway leading up to heaven shone with the violence of a gigantic star.  Faust fell in repentance before the girl he had ruined and failed to ruin, the girl who bent as if to bless him upon this fiery ascent to heaven.  And Julian, absorbed, devoured the wide and glowing scene with his eyes, which were attracted especially by the living flames that were half veiled and half revealed beneath the feet of Margaret.  The music of the orchestra rippled faintly, and then it seemed to Julian that, as if in answer, there rippled up from the golden stairs and from the hidden company of flames that faint, thin riband of shadowy fire which had already so strangely been with him in the dawn and in the dusk.  It came from beneath the pausing feet of the girl who blessed Faust, and trembled upwards slowly above her glittering hair.  Julian felt a burning sensation at his heart, as if the tiny fire found its way there.  He turned round sharply, withdrawing his arm from Cuckoo’s waist with an abruptness that startled her.

“Valentine!” he exclaimed in a whisper.  “There; now you see it.”

Valentine leaned to him.

“See what?”

“The flame.  It’s no fancy.  It’s no chimera.  Look, it is mounting up behind Margaret.  Watch it, Valentine, and tell me what it is.”

“I see nothing.”

Julian stared into his eyes, as if to make certain that he really spoke the truth.  Then Valentine asked of Cuckoo: 

“Miss Bright, can you see this flame of which Julian speaks?”

Cuckoo answered, with the roughness that always came to her in the company of alarm: 

“Not I. There ain’t nothing, no more than there was that day when I had the coffee.”

She added to Julian, reproachfully: 

“You’ve been drinkin’.  Now, dearie, you have.”

Suddenly his two companions became intolerable to Julian.  He thought them stupid, boorish, dense, devoid of the senses of common humanity, not to see what he saw, not to feel as he felt,—­that this vague flame had a meaning and a message not yet interpreted, perhaps not even remotely divined.  With an angry exclamation he sprang to his feet, turning once more to the stage.  And as the curtain fell, he distinctly saw the flame glowing like a long and curiously shaped star above the head of Margaret.

And this man and woman would not see it!  A sudden enmity to them both came to him in that moment.  He abruptly opened the door of the box, and went out without another word to either of them.  Cuckoo’s voice shrilly calling to him to stop did not affect his resolution and desire to escape from them if only for a moment.