alted; a slight flush,
like rouge, tinted her cheeks.

"Tant que si sur ce point la nuit ne fut venue,
Toujours comme cela je me serais tenue,
Ne voulaut point ceder, ni recevoir l'ennui
Qu'il me put estimer moins civile que lui...."

He called to her from the bed, where he was lying on his elbow.

"Now come!"

Whereupon, full of animation and with heightened colour, she exclaimed:

"Don't you think that I, too, love you!"

She flung herself beside her lover. Supple and wholly surrendered, she
threw back her head, offering to his kisses her eyes veiled with shadowy
lashes and her half-parted lips, from which gleamed a moist flash of
white.

Of a sudden she started to her knees. Her staring eyes were filled with
unspeakable terror. A hoarse scream escaped from her throat, followed by
a wail as long drawn out and gentle as an organ note. Turning her head,
she pointed to the white fur spread out at the foot of the bed.

"There! There! He is lying there like a crouching dog, with a hole in
his head. He is looking at me, with the blood trickling from the corner
of his mouth."

Her eyes, wide open, rolled up, showing the whites. Her body stretched
backward like a bow, and, when it had recovered its suppleness, she fell
as if dead.

He bathed her temples with cold water, and brought her back to
consciousness. In a childlike voice she whimpered that every joint in
her body was broken. Feeling a burning sensation in the hollow of her
hand, she looked, and saw that the palm was cut and bleeding.

She said:

"It's my nails, they've gone into my hand. See, my nails are full of
blood!"

She thanked him tenderly for his ministrations, and apologized sweetly
for causing him so much trouble.

"It was not for that you came, was it?"

She tried to smile, and looked around her.

"It's nice, here."

Her gaze met the call to rehearsal lying open on the bedside table, and
she sighed:

"What is the use of my being a great actress if I am not happy?"

Without realizing it, she was repeating word for word what Chevalier
had said when she rejected his advances.

Then, raising her still stupefied head from the pillow in which it had
lain buried, she turned her mournful eyes toward her lover, and said to
him resignedly:

"We did indeed love each other, we two. It is over. We shall never again
belong to each other; no, never. He forbids it!"

THE END

[Transcriber's Note:

The following typographical