ould go and he entreated her never again to withhold a single
hour of the ideal happiness which she had promised him. She let her
tears flow. They kissed like a despairing brother and sister who have
been smitten with a common loss and who meet to mourn a dead parent.

Suddenly, she snatched herself from the young man's soft and timid
embrace, seemed to listen to something, and, with a quick gesture,
pointed to the door. When he was on the threshold, she said, in so low
a voice that the viscount guessed rather than heard her words:

"To-morrow, my dear betrothed! And be happy, Raoul: I sang for you
to-night!"

He returned the next day. But those two days of absence had broken the
charm of their delightful make-believe. They looked at each other, in
the dressing-room, with their sad eyes, without exchanging a word.
Raoul had to restrain himself not to cry out:

"I am jealous! I am jealous! I am jealous!"

But she heard him all the same. Then she said:

"Come for a walk, dear. The air will do you good."

Raoul thought that she would propose a stroll in the country, far from
that building which he detested as a prison whose jailer he could feel
walking within the walls ... the jailer Erik ... But she took him to
the stage and made him sit on the wooden curb of a well, in the
doubtful peace and coolness of a first scene set for the evening's
performance.

On another day, she wandered with him, hand in, hand, along the
deserted paths of a garden whose creepers had been cut out by a
decorator's skilful hands. It was as though the real sky, the real
flowers, the real earth were forbidden her for all time and she
condemned to breathe no other air than that of the theater. An
occasional fireman passed, watching over their melancholy idyll from
afar. And she would drag him up above the clouds, in the magnificent
disorder of the grid, where she loved to make him giddy by running in
front of him along the frail bridges, among the thousands of ropes
fastened to the pulleys, the windlasses, the rollers, in the midst of a
regular forest of yards and masts. If he hesitated, she said, with an
adorable pout of her lips:

"You, a sailor!"

And then they returned to terra firma, that is to say, to some passage
that led them to the little girls' dancing-school, where brats between
six and ten were practising their steps, in the hope of becoming great
dancers one day, "covered with diamonds ..." Meanwhile, Christin