“Oh, do make use of me, Miss Shirley!”

“That you could give me some hints about the setting, with your knowledge of the stage—­” She stopped, having rushed forward to that point, while he continued to look steadily at her without answering her.  She faced him courageously, but not convincingly.

“Did you think that I was an actor?” he asked, finally.

“Mrs. Westangle seemed to think you were.”

“But did you?”

“I’m sure I didn’t mean—­I beg your pardon—­”

“It’s all right.  If I were an actor I shouldn’t be ashamed of it.  But I was merely curious to know whether you shared the prevalent superstition.  I’m afraid I can’t help you from a knowledge of the stage, but if I can be of use, from a sort of amateur interest in psychology, with an affair like this I shall be only too glad.”

“Thank you,” she said, somewhat faintly, with an effect of dismay disproportionate to the occasion.

She sank into a chair before which she had been standing, and she looked as if she were going to swoon.

He started towards her with an alarmed “Miss Shirley.”

She put out a hand weakly to stay him.  “Don’t!” she entreated.  “I’m a little—­I shall be all right in a moment.”

“Can’t I get you something—­call some one?”

“Not for the world!” she commanded, and she pulled herself together and stood up.  “But I think I’ll stop for to-night.  I’m glad my idea strikes you favorably.  It’s merely—­Oh, you found it, Mrs. Stager!” She broke off to address the woman who had now come back and was holding up the trailing breadths of the electric-blue gauze.  “Isn’t it lovely?” She gave herself time to adore the drapery, with its changes of meteoric lucence, before she rose and took it.  She went with it to the background in the library, where, against the glass door of the cases, she involved herself in it and stood shimmering.  A thrill pierced to Verrian’s heart; she was indeed wraithlike, so that he hated to have her call, “How will that do?”

Mrs. Stager modestly referred the question to him by her silence.  “I will answer for its doing, if it does for the others as it’s done for me.”

She laughed.  “And you doubly knew what it was.  Yes, I think it will go.”  She took another pose, and then another.  “What do you think of it, Mrs. Stager?” she called to the woman standing respectfully abeyant at one side.

“It’s awful.  I don’t know but I’ll be afraid to go to my room.”

“Sit down, and I’ll go to your room with you when I’m through.  I won’t be long, now.”

She tried different gauzes, which she had lying on one of the chairs, and crowned herself with triumph in the applauses of her two spectators, rejoicing with a glee that Verrian found childlike and winning.  “If they’re all like you, it will be the greatest success!”

“They’ll all be like me, and more,” he said, “I’m really very severe.”