feeling of embarrassment, of compunction. It seemed
to him that he must have sat with his eyes riveted on her. Resolutely, he
turned them toward the stage until the poignant sweetness of the
intermezzo began to dream through his consciousness as an echo of "that
melody born of melody which melts the world into a sea," and then,
involuntarily, without premeditation, obeying a seemingly enforced
impulse, he had turned toward her and she had lifted her eyes, violet
eyes, touched with all regret; and a sudden surprised ecstasy had invaded
every corner of his heart and filled it with sweetness and warmth, for
the music, that enchanting, never-to-be-forgotten intermezzo, had
revealed to him--the fairy princess.

In a moment that he dreamed not of, around some unexpected corner of
life, she had turned her feet and he, crass fool that he was, was not
sure that it was she; like all faithless generations, he had waited for a
sign, until at last, in the ebb and flow of the music, she had lifted her
sweet eyes and he had known her finally, irrevocably, and for ever.

He could not gratify his own insistent longing to move nearer her, or to
gaze and gaze at her, so during the next act he confined his glances
rigorously to the stage. Almost immediately, however, after the curtain
fell, he happened to glance, by mere chance, toward one of the boxes, and
his heart stood still, for there far back in the shadowy depths, she was
standing talking earnestly to a dark, thin woman in rose-color with
drooping cerise wings in her shining black hair.

He turned involuntarily, half believing himself the victim of some
hallucination and expecting to see her still sitting in her seat, only to
find that she really had gone. For a moment, a cold chill ran down his
back. How could she have vanished without his knowing it? It seemed
incredible. What an uncanny way she had of coming and going! He glanced
up at the box again where he fancied he had seen her; but the lady in
cerise was now seated, talking to two or three men.

Good heavens! He began seriously to doubt the evidence of his senses. Had
she, his fairy princess, ever really been in the house at all or had he
dreamed her--her and her butterflies? Was she, after all, some fantasy
born of the music and his dreaming imagination? And would it ever be
possible to dream her again; or, if she were real, where, where could he
find her? To discover a fairy princess and to lose her, lose her, as he
ru