nd her arms would be about his neck, and all those secret
aspirations and yearnings and dreams of wedded joy would be realised at
last.

He grinned to himself sitting there in the hot darkness of the South
African night, the great white stars and the vast purple dome they
throbbed in shut out of sight by the miserable little gaily-papered
ceiling with its cornice of gilt wood, remembering that everything had
ended there. Thenceforth no more hopes, no dreams, for the man whom Fate
and Destiny, hitherto propitious and obliging, had conspired to lash with
scourges, and drive with goads, and hound with despairs and horrors to the
sheer brink where Madness waits to hurl the desperate over upon the jagged
rocks below.

He supped with them at Pont Street. Mildred came down to say good-night at
the door.

"Have you been happy?" he had asked, framing the sweet young face in
tender hands, and looking in the pretty, gentle brown eyes.

"You have been so very dear and kind to-night," she had answered, "how
could I have helped being happy? And He"--she meant the Semitic
actor-manager, whom she romantically adored; whose thick, flabby features
and pale gooseberry orbs, thickly outlined in blue pencil, eyebrowed with
brown grease-paint; whose long, shapeless body, eloquent, expressive
hands, and legs that were very good as legs go, taking them separately,
but did not match, had been that night, his admirers declared, moved and
possessed by the very spirit of Shakespearean Tragedy--"He was so great!
Don't you agree with me--marvellously great?"

Saxham had laughed and kissed the enthusiast. It had appeared to him a
dreary performance enough, or it would have, had it not been for Mildred
and the dear glamour with which her presence had invested the great
gilded auditorium, with its rows of bored, familiar, notable faces in the
stalls, representing Society, Art, Literature, Music, and Finance; its pit
and gallery crowded with organised bodies of theatre-goers, one party
certain to boo where the other applauded, riot and disorder the inevitable
result, unless by a coincidence rare as snow at Midsummer the rival
associations might be won upon to display a unanimity of approval, upon
which the dramatic Press-critics would rapturously descant in the
newspapers next morning.

XV

Saxham said his lingering sweet good-night, and shut Mildred into the
warm, lighted hall, and ran down the steps, and hailed a passing hansom,
and w