Of necessity, importunate grief was drugged to sleep.  In the daylight hours she must study, must rehearse with her fellow players; when night came she put on a beautiful dress, and to lights and music and loud applause there entered Monimia, or Belvidera, or Athenais.  When the play was done and the curtain fallen, the crowd of those who would have stayed her ever gave way, daunted by her eyes, her closed lips, the atmosphere that yet wrapped her of passion, woe, and exaltation, the very tragedy of the soul that she had so richly painted.  Like the ghost of that woman who had so direfully loved and died, she was wont to slip from the playhouse, through the dark garden, to the small white house and her quiet room.  There she laid off her gorgeous dress, and drew the ornaments from her dark hair that was long as Molly’s had been that day beneath the sugar-tree in the far-away valley.

She rarely thought of Molly now, or of the mountains.  With her hair shadowing her face and streaming over bared neck and bosom she sat before her mirror.  The candle burned low; the face in the glass seemed not her own.  Dim, pale, dark-eyed, patient-lipped at last, out of a mist and from a great distance the other woman looked at her.  Far countries, the burning noonday and utter love, night and woe and life, the broken toy, flung with haste away!  The mist thickened; the face withdrew, farther, farther off; the candle burned low.  Audrey put out the weak flame, and laid herself upon the bed.  Sleep came soon, and it was still and dreamless.  Sometimes Mary Stagg, light in hand, stole into the room and stood above the quiet form.  The girl hardly seemed to breathe:  she had a fashion of lying with crossed hands and head drawn slightly back, much as she might be laid at last in her final bed.  Mistress Stagg put out a timid hand and felt the flesh if it were warm; then bent and lightly kissed hand or arm or the soft curve of the throat.  Audrey stirred not, and the other went noiselessly away; or Audrey opened dark eyes, faintly smiled and raised herself to meet the half-awed caress, then sank to rest again.

Into Mistress Stagg’s life had struck a shaft of colored light, had come a note of strange music, had flown a bird of paradise.  It was and it was not her dead child come again.  She knew that her Lucy had never been thus, and the love that she gave Audrey was hardly mother love.  It was more nearly an homage, which, had she tried, she could not have explained.  When they were alone together, Audrey called the older woman “mother,” often knelt and laid her head upon the other’s lap or shoulder.  In all her ways she was sweet and duteous, grateful and eager to serve.  But her spirit dwelt in a rarer air, and there were heights and depths where the waif and her protectress might not meet.  To this the latter gave dumb recognition, and though she could not understand, yet loved her protegee.  At night, in the playhouse, this love was heightened into exultant worship.  At all times