“This evening at eight,” the manager reminded her.  “Don’t forget—­and maybe you’ll feel better then.”

For a moment she halted.  She had reached the stage-door, other performers were leaving the theater.  She gazed back into the face of Mr. Abey Lewis, and said blankly, “This evening—­what is this evening?”

They sought to stop her, but there was something in those wide eyes that petrified them all.  For the time Mr. Lewis remained as one hypnotized.  The door-man was gazing at her with an expression of awe and wonderment.

Mary herself stood there with the cloak falling open so that the convulsive throbbing of her throat was laid bare.  The two marvelous and mismated eyes looked at them all and did not see them.  The sister of Hamilton Burton, the woman whom two continents had toasted, was seeing other things.  “Let me pass,” she commanded, and they stood aside and saw her go out into the gathering night and the blizzard.

Smitherton rushed after her.

“Let me at least put you in a taxi’,” he pleaded, but she shook her head.

“You can do only one thing now,” she said.  “For God’s sake, leave me alone.”

Though he knew she was in no condition to be left to herself, the spell of those eyes was upon him, too.  It was impossible to disobey.  He stood there and saw her turn the corner, buffeted by the wind, and disappear.

Then he became conscious of a newsboy’s shrieking:  “Last ’dition—­All ’bout the Burton trad-egy!”

Part III

THE MOUNTAIN TOP

THE STORY THAT WAS

CHAPTER XXXV

It was a June day with the sparkle and lilt of summer’s brightest and tunefulest mood in the sky and a softness and warmth in the air.  The most distant peaks of the mountains slept in a quiet and purple glory and their nearer slopes still held a forest-freshness undulled by heat and sunburn.

Deep in the woods of the White Mountains the wild flowers were springing joyously and the birds were pouring out the fulness of life and joy and love from trilling throats.

The waters of Lake Forsaken were like a mirror holding in their still bosom all the vivid color which summer paints into its first and sweetest days while an after-note of spring’s youth still lingers.  The blue of the sky was broken only by white cloud-sails that rode high and buoyant in the upper air currents, like galleons of dreams, and all these things were given back in reflection from depths where the bass leaped and the sun shimmered.  On the lake’s farther margin a red-brown shape came down with careful feet gingerly lifted and set down, to raise its antlered head.  But the gentle eyes were not charged with fear, for this was a season of security and truce with mankind.

If the world held trouble anywhere, no shadow of its passing riffled or marred the landscape here.  And yet in this smile and song of nature, there must be a certain disregard for human affairs, because the movement which held the deer’s gaze, as he stood there at the water’s edge, looking across the width of Lake Forsaken, was the movement of human beings trailing along the road in a funeral cortege.