Project Gutenberg's The Amazing Interlude, by Mary Roberts Rinehart

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Title: The Amazing Interlude

Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart

Release Date: December 23, 2004 [EBook #1590]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMAZING INTERLUDE ***

Produced by An anonymous PG volunteer and David Garcia

[Illustration: Officers stopping in to fight their paper and pin
battles.]

THE AMAZING INTERLUDE

By Mary Roberts Rinehart

ILLUSTRATIONS BY
THE KINNEYS

[Transcriber's Note: Troy and Margaret West]

1918

ILLUSTRATIONS

Officers stopping in to fight their paper and pin battles.

Henri explained the method.

"That I should have hurt you so!" he said softly.

That Henri might be living, somewhere, that some day the Belgians might
go home again.

I

The stage on which we play our little dramas of life and love has for
most of us but one setting. It is furnished out with approximately the
same things. Characters come, move about and make their final exits
through long-familiar doors. And the back drop remains approximately
the same from beginning to end. Palace or hovel, forest or sea, it is
the background for the moving figures of the play.

So Sara Lee Kennedy had a back drop that had every appearance of
permanency. The great Scene Painter apparently intended that there
should be no change of set for her. Sara Lee herself certainly expected
none.

But now and then amazing things are done on this great stage of ours:
lights go down; the back drop, which had given the illusion of solidity,
reveals itself transparent. A sort of fairyland transformation takes
place. Beyond the once solid wall strange figures move on--a new _mise
en scene_, with the old blotted out in darkness. The lady, whom we left
knitting by the fire, becomes a fairy--Sara Lee became a fairy, of a
sort--and meets the prince. Adventure, too; and love, of course. And
then the lights go out, and it is the same old back drop again, and the
lady is back by the fire--but with a memory.

This is the story of Sara Lee Kennedy's memory--and of something more.

* * * *