t you fret
about that, Leota. I'm bound to have her go round with these people she
knows. I want her to be with them all she can."

A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his
fagged eyes.

"You seen Elmer again?"

"No. Once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like Undine's.

"Why--you SAID he couldn't come after her, Abner!"

"No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and
want to go after him?"

Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "How'd he look? Just the
same?" she whispered.

"No. Spruced up. That's what scared me."

It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless
cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "You look
fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach
drops right off," she proposed.

But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to
risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture
familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess
Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night."

V

She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked
up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a
line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose
privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that
the curtain has fallen.

As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel
Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her
apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the
faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness
seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from
the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze
of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast
illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the
shafts of light into a centre.

It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the
curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the
scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering
the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to
subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made
her feel so oddly brittle and transparent.

When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be