ess at a beautiful woman from far away, from another sort
of life and feeling and understanding than his own, who had in her face
something he had known long ago, much brightened and beautified. As a
lad he used to believe that the faces of people who died were like that
in the next world; the same faces, but shining with the light of a new
understanding. No, Ottenburg had not prepared him!

What he felt was admiration and estrangement. The homely reunion, that
he had somehow expected, now seemed foolish. Instead of feeling proud
that he knew her better than all these people about him, he felt
chagrined at his own ingenuousness. For he did not know her better. This
woman he had never known; she had somehow devoured his little friend, as
the wolf ate up Red Ridinghood. Beautiful, radiant, tender as she was,
she chilled his old affection; that sort of feeling was not appropriate.
She seemed much, much farther away from him than she had seemed all
those years when she was in Germany. The ocean he could cross, but there
was something here he could not cross. There was a moment, when she
turned to the King and smiled that rare, sunrise smile of her childhood,
when he thought she was coming back to him. After the HERALD'S second
call for her champion, when she knelt in her impassioned prayer, there
was again something familiar, a kind of wild wonder that she had had the
power to call up long ago. But she merely reminded him of Thea; this was
not the girl herself.

After the tenor came on, the doctor ceased trying to make the woman
before him fit into any of his cherished recollections. He took her, in
so far as he could, for what she was then and there. When the knight
raised the kneeling girl and put his mailed hand on her hair, when she
lifted to him a face full of worship and passionate humility, Archie
gave up his last reservation. He knew no more about her than did the
hundreds around him, who sat in the shadow and looked on, as he looked,
some with more understanding, some with less. He knew as much about
ORTRUDE or LOHENGRIN as he knew about ELSA--more, because she went
further than they, she sustained the legendary beauty of her conception
more consistently. Even he could see that. Attitudes, movements, her
face, her white arms and fingers, everything was suffused with a rosy
tenderness, a warm humility, a gracious and yet--to him--wholly
estranging beauty.

During the balcony singing in the second act the doctor's