he
would soon have passed beyond his grasp and touch, just as Elvira would
have vanished in a little while from the sight of the great audience
which now hung upon her every movement.

Then from the consciousness of his own private smart he was swept out,
whether he would or no, into the general current of feeling which was
stirring the multitude of human beings around him, and he found himself
gradually mastered by considerations of a different order altogether. Was
this the actress he had watched with such incessant critical revolt six
months before? Was this the half-educated girl, grasping at results
utterly beyond her realisation, whom he remembered?

It seemed to him impossible that this quick artistic intelligence, this
nervous understanding of the demands made upon her, this faculty in
meeting them, could have been developed by the same Isabel Bretherton
whose earlier image was so distinctly graven on his memory. And yet his
trained eye learned after a while to decipher in a hundred indications
the past history of the change. He saw how she had worked, and where; the
influences which had been brought to bear upon her were all familiar to
him; they had been part of his own training, and they belonged, as he
knew, to the first school of dramatic art in Europe--to the school which
keeps alive from generation to generation the excellence and fame of the
best French drama. He came to estimate by degrees all that she had done;
he saw also all she had still to do. In the spring she had been an
actress without a future, condemned by the inexorable logic of things to
see her fame desert her with the first withering of her beauty. Now she
had, as it were, but started towards her rightful goal, but her feet were
in the great high-road, and Kendal saw before her, if she had but
strength to reach it, the very highest summit of artistic success.

The end of the first act was reached; Elvira, returning from the
performance of the marriage ceremony in the chapel of the palace, had
emerged hand-in-hand with her husband, and, followed by her wedding
train, upon the great hall. She had caught sight of Macias standing
blanched and tottering under the weight of the incredible news which had
just been given to him by the Duke. She had flung away the hateful hand
which held her, and, with a cry, instinct with the sharp and terrible
despair of youth, she had thrown herself at the feet of her lover.

When the curtain fell, Edward Wal