udge, or
judges, prepared to join in the great decision by which was to be
decided a fate. Both Claude and Charmian were thinking of this as they
stood together, while the darkness gathered about them and the cold wind
eddied by. And Charmian longed passionately to have the power to
hypnotize all those brains into thinking Claude's work wonderful, all
those hearts into loving it. For a moment the thought of the human
being's independence almost appalled her.

"It looks cold and almost dead now," she murmured. "How different it
will look in a few hours!"

"Yes."

They still stood there, almost like two children, fascinated by the
sight of the theater. Charmian was rapt. For a moment she forgot the
passers-by, the gliding motor-cars, the noises of the city, even
herself. She was giving herself imaginatively to fate, not as herself,
but merely as a human life. She was feeling the profound mystery of
human life held in the arms of destiny. An abrupt movement of Claude
almost startled her.

"What is it?" she said.

She looked up at him quickly.

"What's the matter, Claude?"

"Nothing," he answered. "But it's time we went back to the hotel. Come
along."

And without another glance at the theater he turned round and began to
walk quickly.

He had seen on the other side of the way, going toward the theater, the
colored woman in the huge pink hat, of whom he had caught a glimpse on
the night when Alston Lake had fetched him and Charmian to see the
rehearsal of the "locust-effect." The woman turned her head, seemed to
gaze at him across the road with her bulging eyes, stretched her thick
lips in a smile. Then she took her place in a queue which was beginning
to lengthen outside one of the gallery doors of the theater.

CHAPTER XXXVI

The great theater which Jacob Crayford had built to "knock out" the
Metropolitan Opera House filled slowly. Those dark and receding
galleries, which had drawn the eyes of Charmian, were already crowded,
alive with white moving faces, murmurous with voices. In the corridors
and the lobbies many men were standing and talking. Smartly dressed
women began to show themselves in the curving ranges of boxes. Musical
critics and newspaper men gathered in knots and discussed the musical
season, the fight that was "on" between the two opera houses, the
libretto-scandal, which had not yet entirely died down, Jacob Crayford's
prospects of becoming a really great power in opera.

Crayfor