trous thing. Hugh made no further protest,
but that his queenly sister, after walking untouched through swarms of
rich and talented suitors, should fall a victim to a poor and unknown
architect, who was a failure at his own business as well as a
playwright.

Mrs. MacDavitt, who stood quite in awe of her daughter, and who feared
the sudden, hot temper of her son, passed through some trying hours as
the days went by. Helen was plainly suffering, and the mother cautioned
the son to speak gently. "I fear she prized him highly--the young
Douglass," she said, "and, I confess, I had a kin' o' liking for the
lad. He was so keen and resolved."

"He was keen to 'do' us, mother, and when he found he couldn't he pulled
his freight. He could write, I'll admit that, but he wouldn't write what
people wanted to hear. He was too badly stuck on his own 'genius.'"

Helen went to her task at the theatre without heart, though she
pretended to a greater enthusiasm than ever. But each time she entered
upon the second act of the play a mysterious and solacing pleasure came
to her. She enjoyed the words with which _Enid_ questions the life of
her richest and most powerful suitor. The mingled shrewdness,
simplicity, and sweetness of this scene always filled her with a new
sense of Douglass's power of divination. Indeed, she closed the play
each night with a sense of being more deeply indebted to him as well as
a feeling of having been near him. Once she saw a face strangely like
his in the upper gallery, and the blood tingled round her heart, and she
played the remainder of the act with mind distraught. "Can it be
possible that he is still in the city?" she asked herself.

XVIII

It was, indeed, the playwright. Each night he left his boarding-place,
drawn by an impulse he could not resist, to walk slowly to and fro
opposite the theatre entrance, calculating with agonized eye the meagre
numbers of those who entered. At times he took his stand near the door
in a shadowy nook (with coat-collar rolled high about his ears), in
order to observe the passing stream, hoping, exulting, and suffering
alternately as groups from the crowd paused for a moment to study the
displayed photographs, only to pass on to other amusement with some
careless allusion to the fallen star.

This hurt him worst of all--that these motes, these cheap little boys
and girls, could now sneer at or pity Helen Merival. "I brought her to
this," he repeated, with morb