lous of Castrillon, who gazed into Brigit's eyes and
uttered his lines with the most touching air of passionate devotion. She
seemed to respond, and, in fact, their joint performance had that
delicate, irresistible abandon--apparently unconscious and
unpremeditated--which is only possible between two players who are not
in love with each other. Where there is actual feeling, there is always
a certain awkwardness and want of conviction (partly caused by the
inadequacy of the diagram in comparison with the reality), and the
charm, so far as art is concerned, is wholly lost. An acted love was the
only love possible between Brigit and Castrillon; hence its sincerity on
the stage, where, as a merely assumed thing, it harmonised perfectly
with its artificial surroundings--the canvas landscape, the painted
trees, the mechanical birds, and the sunlight produced by tricks of
gauze and gas. But Orange did not stop to consider this. It was enough
and too much to see his "sad spirit of the elfin race" completely
transformed. Was this the child-like, immature being of their strange
visit to Miraflores? That whole episode seemed a kind of phantasy--a
Midsummer Night's music--nothing more, perhaps something less. The very
title of the play--_The Second Surprise of Love_--carried a mocking
significance. Sometimes the soul speaks first, sometimes the senses
first influence a life, but the turn, soon or late, must inevitably come
for each, and the man or woman, sick of materialism, who begins to
suspect that the unseen world and its beauty is an inheritance more
lasting and more to be desired than all the vindictive joys of this
prison-house, has no such bitterness as the idealist who finds himself
brought into thrilling touch with the physical loveliness, the actual
enchantment, the undeniable delight of certain things in life. The
questions, "What have I missed? What have I lost? What birthright have I
renounced?" are bound to make themselves heard. They beat upon the heart
like hail upon the sand--and fall buried in the scars they cause.
Things of the flesh may and do become dead sea fruit; but things of the
spirit often become stale and meaningless also. What is more weary than
a tired mind? What joys and labours are more exhausting than those of
the intellect, and the intellect only? Does an idle week in summer ever
beget more lassitude or such disgust of life as a month--alone with
books--in a library? Dissatisfaction and satiety, me