er.

The band began to play. It was music for the entrance of a new performer.
The audience became quiet; there was a keen, eager, expectant air; and
then the curtain went up. John Storm felt dizzy. If he could have escaped
he would have turned and fled. He gripped with both hands the rail in
front of him.

Then a woman came gliding on to the stage. She was a tall girl in a dark
dress and long black gloves, with red hair, and a head like a rose. It
was Glory! A cloud came over John Storm's eyes, and for a few moments he
saw no more.

There was some applause from the pit and the regions overhead. The people
in the stalls were waving their handkerchiefs, and the lady in the box
was kissing her hand. Glory was smiling, quite at her ease, apparently
not at all nervous, only a little shy and with her hands interlaced in
front of her. Then there was silence again and she began to sing.

It is the moment when prayers go up from the heart not used to pray.
Strange contradiction! John Storm found himself praying that Glory might
do well, that she might succeed and eclipse everything! But he had turned
his eyes away, and the sound of her voice was even more afflicting than
the sight of her face. It was nearly a year since he had heard it last,
and now he was hearing it under these conditions, in a place like this!
He must have been making noises by his breathing. "Hush! hush!" said the
people about him, and somebody tapped him on the shoulder.

After a moment he regained control of himself, and he lifted his head and
listened. Glory's voice, which had been quavering at first, gathered
strength. She was singing Mylecharaine, and the wild, plaintive harmony
of the old Manx ballad was floating in the air like the sound of the sea.
After her first lines a murmur of approval went round, the people sat up
and leaned forward, and then there was silence again--dead silence--and
then loud applause.

But it was only with the second verse that the humour of her song began,
and John Storm waited for it with a trembling heart. He had heard her
sing it a hundred times in the old days, and she was singing it now as
she had sung it before. There were the same tricks of voice, the same
tricks of gesture, the same expressions, the same grimaces. Everything
was the same, and yet everything was changed. He knew it. He was sure it
must be so. So artless and innocent then, now so subtle and significant!
Where was the difference? The difference w