ngeon?"

"No," said Gerald. "Is she here?"

"Yes; she is with the Rostopchine, in a box of the third order." He
looked up and around to find the box with his eyes, and after a moment
indicated it to Gerald. "There! Do you see them? The Rostopchine in pale
purple, and the Grangeon in an Indian thing all incrusted with green
beetle-wings, a thing for a museum. They are talking with a uniform whom
I do not know. She was speaking of you this evening--Antonia, asking me
what you are doing. She has great faith in your talent."

Gerald's lip curled a little sourly, and he stood looking upward without
reply.

Turning to look down through her jeweled lorgnette and running her eyes
over the crowd, Antonia now saw him. Recognition lighted her face to
unexpected liveliness. She fluttered her hand to him demonstratively.

After bowing and smiling, he stood quietly, with face upturned,
receiving her showered greetings.

He had a certain knowledge of Antonia. She was capable of entirely
dropping the remembrance of her bad treatment of him; perhaps forgetting
it really, but likelier choosing merely that he should forget it. She
permitted herself the caprices of a spoiled beauty.

A classic golden fillet this evening bound her gray locks; a jewel
depending from it sparkled upon the deeply lined forehead of a
brain-worker. Her irreparably withered neck was clasped by an Indian
necklace, showy as a piece of stage jewelry. Light-minded smiles
wreathed her heavy face. Where her sleeves stopped there began the soft
and serried wrinkles of those long, long buttonless gloves which Sarah
Bernhardt had brought into fashion.

It was not difficult to see in what illusion Antonia chose to live
to-night. Her readers might even, perhaps, have determined which of her
own heroines she personated.

For all these things Gerald liked his old friend the more.

Her lips framed the words, "Come up! Come up!" while her hand made the
equivalent signs.

He nodded assent, and with Guerra walking beside him started on his way.
Guerra under the central box excused himself and turned back, having
already paid his respects. Gerald, once out in the lobby, advanced more
uncertainly, finally hesitated and stopped.

He was not sure he wished to see Antonia in circumstances which would
not allow him to express his resentment of her behavior toward the
friend whom with her formal permission he had brought to her house. It
was owed to Mrs. Hawthorne not to l