, and
yet a certain regret darkened her face. "All that was so sweet and fine
has passed out of our intercourse," she sadly admitted to herself. "I am
no longer even the great actress to him. Once he worshipped me--I felt
it; now I am a commonplace friend. Is the fault in me? Am I one whom
familiarity lessens in value?"

She did not permit herself to think that this was a lasting change, that
he had forever passed beyond the lover, and that she would never again
fill his world with mystery and light and longing.

And yet this monstrous recession was the truth. In the stress of his
work the glamour had utterly died out of Douglass's conception of Helen,
just as the lurid light of her old-time advertising had faded from the
bill-boards and from the window displays of Broadway. As cold, black,
and gray instantaneous photographs had taken the place of the gorgeous,
jewel-bedecked, elaborate lithographs of the old plays, so now his
thought of her was without warmth.

Helen became aware, too, of an outside change. Her friends used this as
a further warning.

"You are becoming commonplace to the public," one said, with a touch of
bitterness. "Your admirers no longer wonder. Go back to the glitter and
the glory."

"No," she replied. "I will regain my place, and with my own unaided
character--and my lines," she added, with a return to her faith in
Douglass.

And yet her meetings with him were now a species of torture. Her
self-respect suffered with every glance of his eyes. He resembled a man
suffering from a fever. At times he talked with tiresome intensity about
some new situation, quoting his own characters, beating and hammering at
his scenes until Helen closed her eyes for very weariness. Only at wide
intervals did he return to some dim realization of his indebtedness to
her. One day he gratified her by saying, with a note of tenderness in
his voice: "You are keeping the old play on; don't do it. Throw it away;
it is a tract--a sermon." Then spoiled it all by bitterly adding, "Go
back to your old successes."

"You used to dislike me in such roles," she answered, with pain and
reproach in face and voice.

"It will only be for a little while," he replied, with a swift return to
his enthusiasm. "In two weeks I'll have the new part ready for you." But
the sting of his advice remained long in the proud woman's heart.

He went no more to the theatre. "I can't bear to see you playing to
empty seats," he declared, in ex