roupe, where she first tasted the power of her
courage, her beauty, and her recklessness. She remembered those flashes
of triumph that left a fever in her veins--a fever that when it failed
must be stimulated by dissipation, by anything, by everything that would
keep her name a wonder in men's mouths, an envious fear to women. She
recalled her transfer to the strolling players; her cheap pleasures, and
cheaper rivalries and hatred--but always Teresa! the daring Teresa! the
reckless Teresa! audacious as a woman, invincible as a boy; dancing,
flirting, fencing, shooting, swearing, drinking, smoking, fighting
Teresa! "Oh, yes; she had been loved, perhaps--who knows?--but always
feared. Why should she change now? Ha, he should see."

She had lashed herself in a frenzy, as was her wont, with gestures,
ejaculations, oaths, adjurations, and passionate apostrophes, but with
this strange and unexpected result. Heretofore she had always been
sustained and kept up by an audience of some kind or quality, if only
perhaps a humble companion; there had always been some one she could
fascinate or horrify, and she could read her power mirrored in their
eyes. Even the half-abstracted indifference of her strange host had been
something. But she was alone now. Her words fell on apathetic solitude;
she was acting to viewless space. She rushed to the opening, dashed the
hanging bark aside, and leaped to the ground.

She ran forward wildly a few steps, and stopped.

"Hallo!" she cried. "Look, 'tis I, Teresa!"

The profound silence remained unbroken. Her shrillest tones were lost
in an echoless space, even as the smoke of her fire had faded into pure
ether. She stretched out her clenched fists as if to defy the pillared
austerities of the vaults around her.

"Come and take me if you dare!"

The challenge was unheeded. If she had thrown herself violently against
the nearest tree-trunk, she could not have been stricken more breathless
than she was by the compact, embattled solitude that encompassed her.
The hopelessness of impressing these cold and passive vaults with
her selfish passion filled her with a vague fear. In her rage of the
previous night she had not seen the wood in its profound immobility.
Left alone with the majesty of those enormous columns, she trembled and
turned faint. The silence of the hollow tree she had just quitted seemed
to her less awful than the crushing presence of these mute and monstrous
witnesses of her weakn