hat I had, not that it
was much, hoping to marry her and take her back with me.... But that is
not what would make my Emmy happy _now_. What she needs is to go on in
this perfect little doll's house, this little haven, thinking of me, and
praying for me, and tending her flowers, and mourning like a dove in its
tree because we are parted."

It was exactly what Aunt Emmy needed. I could not have put it into
words, but this strange man had done so.

"You will not speak," he said, "but you agree with me for all that. I
had to make sure you agreed. Your confirmation is all I wanted, and now
I have it."

It was not that I would not speak. I could not speak. I was thinking of
the room in that horrid wooden house which he had built for her.

After a few minutes he went on quietly:

"I think the thing for me to do is to be ruined, only partially, of
course, not enough to make her miserable, and to hurry back to Australia
without her at once for the time being, and from there to write
regularly by every mail, nice letters (they cannot be forbidden now);
but never to come back any more. A bank has just failed in Australia in
which I had money. The situation can be arranged."

I looked away from him.

"I owe it to her," he said.

THE UNDERSTUDY

The only form of human love that atrophies the heart is the love
of self.

Marion Wright sat in the centre seat of the third row of the stalls,
shivering in spite of her sables. It was the dress rehearsal of her
first play, that play on which she had spent herself to the verge of
mental bankruptcy.

The nauseating presentiment of failure, the distaste and scorn of her
own work, were upon her, which the artist never escapes, which return as
acutely after twenty successes as in the hours of suspense before the
first essay. Marion's surroundings were not of a nature to reassure her.
To her unaccustomed eyes the empty, dimly lit theatre, swathed and
bandaged in dust-sheets, looked ominously dreary. Had any one ever
laughed in this shrouded desert? The long lines of stalls huddled under
their wrinkled coverings stretched before and behind her. The boxes were
shapeless holes of pallid grime. It was as if a London fog had trailed
its dingy veil over everything. There was a fog outside as well, and the
few electric lights which had been turned up peered blurred and yellow.
An immense ladder, three ladders tied together, reared itself from the
stalls to the roof. Somet