nd Van Twiller regarded it so. Besides, the dream was always the
same--a harrowing dream, a dream singularly adapted to shattering the
nerves of a man like Van Twiller. He would imagine himself seated at
the theatre (with all the members of Our Club in the parquette),
watching Mademoiselle Olympe as usual, when suddenly that young lady
would launch herself desperately from the trapeze, and come flying
through the air like a firebrand hurled at his private box. Then the
unfortunate man would wake up with cold drops standing on his forehead.

There is one redeeming feature in this infatuation of Van Twiller's
which the sober moralist will love to look upon--the serene
unconsciousness of the person who caused it. She went through her
_role_ with admirable aplomb, drew her salary, it may be assumed,
punctually, and appears from first to last to have been ignorant that
there was a miserable slave wearing her chains nightly in the left-hand
proscenium box.

That Van Twiller, haunting the theatre with the persistency of an
ex-actor, conducted himself so discreetly as not to draw the fire of
Mademoiselle Olympe's blue eyes shows that Van Twiller, however deeply
under a spell, was not in love. I say this, though I think if Van
Twiller had not been Van Twiller, if he had been a man of no family and
no position and no money, if New York had been Paris and Thirty-fourth
Street a street in the Latin Quarter--but it is useless to speculate on
what might have happened. What did happen is sufficient.

It happened, then, in the second week of Queen Olympe's second
unconscious reign, that an appalling Whisper floated up the Hudson,
effected a landing at a point between Spuyten Duyvil Creek and Cold
Spring, and sought out a stately mansion of Dutch architecture standing
on the bank of the river. The Whisper straightway informed the lady
dwelling in this mansion that all was not well with the last of the Van
Twillers; that he was gradually estranging himself from his peers, and
wasting his nights in a playhouse watching a misguided young woman
turning unmaidenly somersaults on a piece of wood attached to two
ropes.

Mrs. Vanrensselaer Vanzandt Van Twiller came down to town by the next
train to look into this little matter.

She found the flower of the family taking an early breakfast at
11 A. M., in his cosey apartments on Thirty-fourth Street. With the
least possible circumlocution she confronted him with what rumor had
reported of