have no part in him. When that happened which was
appointed to happen, it must find him not only acquiescent but serene
and undisturbed. He composed himself, therefore, with a decent and even
lofty pride. Then he turned his eyes upon the narrow door, there in the
semi-obscurity of the back of the box, and waited. And all the while
royally, triumphantly, Morbita sang.

During that period of waiting--whether in itself brief or prolonged, he
knew not--sensation and thought alike were curiously in abeyance.
Richard neither slept nor woke. He knew that he existed, but all active
relation to being had ceased. And it was with painful effort he in a
measure returned to more ordinary correspondence with fact, aroused by
the sound of low-toned, emphatic speech close at hand, and by a
scratching as of some animal denied and seeking admittance. Then he
perceived that the door yielded, letting in a spread of yellow
brightness from the corridor. And in the midst of that brightness, part
and parcel of it thanks to the lustre of her crocus-yellow dress, her
honey-coloured hair, her fair skin and softly-gleaming ornaments, stood
Helen de Vallorbes. Behind her, momentarily, Richard caught sight of
the young man whose face had impressed him as a ribald travesty of that
of some being altogether worshipful and holy. The face peered at him
with, as it seemed, malicious curiosity over the rounded shoulder of
the woman of ivory and gold, The effect was very hateful, and, with a
sense of thankfulness, Richard saw Helen close the door and come,
alone, down the two steps leading from the back of the box. As she
passed from the dimness into the clearer light, he watched her,
quiescent, yet with absorbing interest. For he perceived that the hands
of the clock had been put back somehow. Intervening years and the many
events of them had ceased to obtain, so that, of all the many Helens,
enchanting or evil, whom he had come to know, he saw now only one, and
that the first and earliest--a little dancer, with blush-roses in her
hat, dainty as a toy, finished to her rosy finger-tips and the toes of
her pretty shoes, merry and merciless, as she had pirouetted round him
mocking his shuffling, uncertain progress across the Chapel-Room at
Brockhurst fifteen years ago.

"Ah! so you have come back!" he exclaimed, almost involuntarily.

Madam de Vallorbes pushed a chair from the front of the box into the
shadow of the velvet draperies beside Richard.

"It i