The woman accepted the enigma of this interview as she had accepted the wonder of the girl’s sudden appearance and the other, incidents of this extraordinary night.  She did not undertake to imagine what the drawing on the menu meant, the words about the one-armed man, the glove dropped for Thompson to pick up, the rose pinned on his coat; it was all of a piece with the mystery that she had stumbled into.

When the motor stopped and she was taken through a little door by an attendant into a theater box, she accepted that as another of these things into which she could not inquire; things that happened to her outside of her volition and directed by authorities which she could not control.

The staging of the opera refined and extended the illusion that she had been transported out of the world by some occult agency.  The wonderful creature that had taken her up out of her abandoned misery before the sordid shop-shutter appeared now in a fairy costume glittering with jewels.  And the gnomes, the monsters and goblins appearing about her were all fabulous creatures, as the girl herself seemed a fabulous creature.

She sighed like one who must awaken from the splendor of a dream to realities of which the sleeper is vaguely conscious.  Only the girl’s voice seemed real.  It seemed some great, heavenly reality like the sunlight or the sweep of the sea.  It filled the packed places of the theater.  She sang and one believed again in the benevolence of heaven; in immortal love.  To the distressed woman effacing herself in the corner of the empty box it was all a sort of inconceivable witch-work.

And it was witch-work, as potent if not as amply fitted with dramatic properties as the witchwork of ancient legend.

The daughter of an obscure juge d’instruction of the Canton of Vaud, singing in a Swiss meadow, had been taken up by a wealthy American, traveling in Switzerland on an April morning-old, enervated with the sun of the Riviera, and displeased with life.  And this rich old woman, her rheumatic fingers loaded with jewels, had transformed the daughter of the juge d’instruction of the Canton of Vaud into a singing wonder that made every human creature see again the dreams of his youth before him leading into the Elysian Fields.

And to the girl herself this transformation also seemed the wonder of witch-work.  Her early life lay so far below in a world remote and detached; a little house in a village of the Canton of Vaud with the genteel poverty that attended the slender salary of a juge d’instruction, and the weight of duties that accumulated on her shoulders.  Her father’s life was given over to the labors of criminal investigation, but it was a field that returned nothing in the way of material gain.  Honorable mention, a medal, the distinction of having his reports copied into the official archives, were the fruits of the man’s life.  She remembered the minutely exhaustive details of those reports which she used to copy painfully at night by the light of a candle.  The old man, absorbed by his deductions, with his trained habits of observation and his prodigious memory, never seemed to realize the drudgery imposed upon the girl by his endless dictation.