ng, "How
long CAN we stay here? How long will it be wise, even if we
are permitted?" But, as if by common consent, no one asked the
question, and we were only too glad to sit out in the garden we had
all learned to love, and to talk of anything which was not war, until
the Critic moved his chair into the middle of the circle, and began
his tale.

"Let me see," he remarked. "I need a property or two," and he pulled
an envelope out of his pocket and laid it on the table, and, leaning
his elbows on it, began:

* * * * *

It was in the Autumn of '81 that I last saw Dillon act.

She had made a great success that winter, yet, in the middle of the
season, she had suddenly disappeared.

There were all kinds of newspaper explanations.

Then she was forgotten by the public that had enthusiastically
applauded her, and which only sighed sadly, a year later, on hearing
of her death, in a far off Italian town,--sighed, talked a little, and
forgot again.

It chanced that a few years later I was in Italy, and being not many
miles from the town where I heard that she was buried, and a trifle
overstrung by a few months delicious, aimless life in that wonderful
country, I was taken with a sentimental fancy to visit her grave.

It was a sort of pilgrimage for me, for I had given to Dillon my first
boyish devotion.

I thought of her, and to remember her was to recall her rare charm,
her beauty, her success, after a long struggle, and the unexpected,
inexplicable manner in which she had abandoned it. It was to recall,
too, the delightful evenings I had spent under her influence, the
pleasure I had had in the passion of her "Juliet," the poetic charm of
her "Viola"; the graceful witchery of her "Rosalind"; how I had smiled
with her "Portia"; laughed with her "Beatrice"; wept with her
"Camille"; in fact how I had yielded myself up to her magnetism with
that ecstatic pleasure in which one gets the best joys of every
passion, because one does not drain the dregs of any.

I well remembered her last night, how she had disappeared, how she had
gone to Europe, how she had died abroad,--all mere facts known in
their bareness only to the public.

It was hard to find the place where she was buried. But at last I
succeeded.

It was in a humble churchyard. The grave was noticeable because it was
well kept, and utterly devoid of the tawdry ornamentation inseparable
from such places in Italy. It was marked by