e from where Van Twiller sat!

This frightful idea fascinated while it chilled him, and helped to make
it nearly impossible for him to keep away from the theatre. In the
beginning his attendance had not interfered with his social duties or
pleasures; but now he came to find it distasteful after dinner to do
anything but read, or walk the streets aimlessly, until it was time to
go to the play. When that was over, he was in no mood to go anywhere
but to his rooms. So he dropped away by insensible degrees from his
habitual haunts, was missed, and began to be talked about at the club.
Catching some intimation of this, he ventured no more in the orchestra
stalls, but shrouded himself behind the draperies of the private box in
which Delaney and I thought we saw him on one occasion.

Now, I find it very perplexing to explain what Van Twiller was wholly
unable to explain to himself. He was not in love with Mademoiselle
Olympe. He had no wish to speak to her, or to hear her speak. Nothing
could have been easier, and nothing further from his desire, than to
know her personally. A Van Twiller personally acquainted with a
strolling female acrobat! Good heavens! That was something possible
only with the discovery of perpetual motion. Taken from her theatrical
setting, from her lofty perch, so to say, on the trapeze-bar, Olympe
Zabriski would have shocked every aristocratic fibre in Van Twiller's
body. He was simply fascinated by her marvelous grace and _elan_, and
the magnetic recklessness of the girl. It was very young in him and
very weak, and no member of the Sorosis, or all the Sorosisters
together, could have been more severe on Van Twiller than he was on
himself. To be weak, and to know it, is something of a punishment for a
proud man. Van Twiller took his punishment, and went to the theatre,
regularly.

"When her engagement comes to an end," he meditated, "that will finish
the business."

Mademoiselle Olympe's engagement finally did come to an end and she
departed. But her engagement had been highly beneficial to the
treasury-chest of the uptown theatre, and before Van Twiller could get
over missing her she had returned from a short Western tour, and her
immediate reappearance was underlined on the play-bills.

On a dead wall opposite the windows of Van Twiller's sleeping-room
there appeared, as if by necromancy, an aggressive poster with
MADEMOISELLE OLYMPE ZABRISKI on it in letters at least a foot high.
This thing sta