ablished, from the moment you appeared
until the end of the second piece. As it is my opinion that any officer
is sufficiently a gentleman to have the right to love a girl of noble
birth, I fell readily under the spell in which she whom you represented
echoed my own sentiments. Bernard Stamply also had just returned from
captivity, and the more enamored of you he became the more I pleased
myself with fancying my own personality an incarnation of his, with less
presumption than would be necessary for me to imagine myself the hero of
which you spoke a moment ago. After the play, a friend brought me here,
presented me to you--"

"And the sympathetic current did the rest!" added Eugenie Gontier,
looking at him tenderly. "Since then you have consecrated to me a part
of whatever time is at your disposal, and I assure you that I never have
been so happy, nor have felt so flattered, in my life."

"Second act!" came the voice of the call-boy from the corridor.

"Will you return here after the fourth act?" said the actress, rising.
"I shall wish to know how you find me in the great scene, and whether
there is another princess de Bouillon among the audience--beware of
her!"

"You know very well that there is not."

"Not yet, perhaps, but military men are so inconstant! By and by,
Maurice!" she murmured, with a smile.

"By and by, Adrienne!" Henri replied, kissing her hand.

He accompanied her to the steps that led to the stage, and, lounging
along the passage that ends at the head of the grand stairway, he
entered the theatre and hastened to his usual seat in the third row of
the orchestra.

CHAPTER XII. RIVAL BEAUTIES

It was Tuesday, the subscription night; the auditorium was as much the
more brilliant as the play was more interesting than on other nights.
In one of the proscenium boxes sat the Duchesse de Montgeron with the
Comtesse de Lisieux; in another the Vicomtesse de Nointel and Madame
Thomery. In the first box on the left Madame Desvanneaux was to be
seen, with her husband and her son, the youthful and recently rejected
pretender to the hand of Mademoiselle de Vermont.

Among the subscription seats in the orchestra sat the Baron de Samoreau,
the notary Durand, treasurer of the Industrial Orphan Asylum; the
aide-de-camp of General Lenaieff, beside his friend the Marquis de
Prerolles. One large box, the first proscenium loge on the right, was
still unoccupied when the curtain rose on the second act.

Th