installed in a box, all by himself, was eagerly interested in
the audience as it came straggling into the house, which, thanks to
the paper distributed, ultimately presented a pretty compact
appearance. He himself was ignorant how much real business had been
done, but, so far as he could judge, the gallery and pit were being
fairly well patronised. No doubt a good many had been drawn by the
gorgeous poster representing Cleo, twice her natural size, and dressed
in a costume somewhat like the one she had worn when he had first made
her acquaintance. Appropriately huge ornamental letter-press declared
her to be "The Basha's Favourite;" and it was on the first act of "The
Basha's Favourite" that the audience was now waiting for the curtain
to rise.

And at this moment of culminating excitement the scene impressed
Morgan curiously. His mood was essentially one of romance. That the
play itself was full of inanities was forgotten; but its title and
Egyptian colour together with Cleo's personality had somehow got
inter-blent and interwoven with the enterprise itself, making even
its commercial and prosaic sides instinct with mystery and unreality.
He seemed to have wandered into an Arabian Nights' tale. The figures
that filled the stalls, pit, and galleries took on the aspect of a
crowd that might people a dream or the visions a child seeks in its
pillow. He was conscious of the shapeless totality of myriad
conversations--a blur of sound, mystic and bewildering.

Now, too, the front rows of stalls, which he knew were reserved for
the critics, began to fill, and a waft of unpleasantness came to him
as he recognised a few of the acquaintances he had made at recent
supper parties. The disturbance was fatal to his mood. He felt
suddenly unstrung. A strange sense of unhappiness invaded him--a
bitter, far-embracing uncertainty. He was uncertain of himself, of his
life, of all life. The solid scene faded from before his eyes. He
became self-centred. All his consciousness of living and having
lived--his consciousness of all he had ever felt and all he had ever
thought and all he had ever done--was with him as a vast bitterness
that gave him a sense as of an infinite nebula. And then, as in a
flash, this nebula concentred itself into a point--a point that was
his whole sense of life and consciousness. He was now as in a black
tomb, without past, without future, without sense of direction,
without an active thought; with only a mere aw