lace could have had few doubts--if he
had ever cherished any--of the success of his play. He himself escaped
behind the scenes as soon as Miss Bretherton's last recall was over,
and the box was filled in his absence with a stream of friends, and a
constant murmur of congratulation, which was music in the ears of Madame
de Chateauvieux, and, for the moment, silenced in Kendal his own
throbbing and desolate consciousness.

'There never was a holiday turned to such good account before,' a
gray-haired dramatic critic was saying to her, a man with whose keen,
good-natured face London had been familiar for the last twenty years.
'What magic has touched the beauty, Madame de Chateauvieux? Last spring
we all felt as though one fairy godmother at least had been left out at
the christening. And now it would seem as though even she had repented of
it, and brought her gift with the rest. Well, well, I always felt there
was something at the bottom in that nature that might blossom yet. Most
people who are younger at the trade than I would not hear of it. It was
commonly agreed that her success would last just as long as the first
freshness of her beauty, and no more. And _now_--the English stage has
laid its hold at last upon a great actress.'

Madame de Chateauvieux's smiling reply was broken by the reappearance of
Wallace, round whom the buzz of congratulation closed with fresh vigour.

'How is she?' asked Madame de Chateauvieux, laying a hand on his arm.
'Tired?'

'Not the least! But, of course, all the strain is to come. It is amazing,
you know, this reception. It's almost more trying than the acting. Forbes
in the wings, looking on, is a play in himself!'

In another minute the hubbub had swept out again, and the house had
settled into silence.

Macias was the central figure of the second act. In the great scene of
explanation between himself and Elvira, after he had forced his way into
her apartment, his fury of jealous sarcasm, broken by flashes of the old
absolute trust, of the old tender worship, had been finely conceived, and
was well rendered by the promising young actor, whom Wallace had himself
chosen for the part, Elvira, overwhelmed by the scorn and despair of her
lover, and, conscious of the treachery which has separated them, is yet
full of a blind resolve to play the part she has assumed to the bitter
end, to save her own name and her father's from dishonour, and to
interpose the irrevocable barrier of her ma