fathomed depth
remained to vex and to allure him.

Magnified by these reflections on the walls, haloed by the teeming
praise and censure of the press, she seemed to dominate the entire city
as she had come to absorb the best of his own life. What her private
character really was no one seemed to know, in spite of the special
articles and interviews with her managers which fed the almost universal
adulation of her dark and changeful face, her savage and sovereign
beauty. There was insolence in her tread, and mad allurement in the
rounded beauty of her powerful white arm--and at his weakest the young
playwright admitted that all else concerning her was of no account.

At the same time he insisted that he was not involved with the
woman--only with the actress. "I am not a lover--I am a playwright,
eager to have my heroine adequately portrayed," he contended with
himself in the solitude of his room, high in one of the great apartment
buildings of the middle city. Nevertheless, the tremor in his nerves
caused him thought.

Her voice. Yes, that, too, was mysterious. Whence came that undertone
like the moan of a weary wastrel tortured with dreams of idyllic
innocence long lost? Why did her utterance, like her glorious face,
always suggest some inner, darker meaning? There were times when she
seemed old--old as vice and cruelty, hoarse with complaints, with
curses, and then again her lips were childishly sweet, and her voice
carried only the wistful accents of adolescence or the melody of girlish
awe.

On the night before his appointment she played _The Baroness Telka_, a
lurid, lustful, remorseless woman--a creature with a vampire's heart and
the glamour of Helen of Troy--a woman whose cheeks were still round and
smooth, but whose eyes were alight with the flame of insanity--a
frightful, hungry, soulless wretch. And as he sat at the play and
watched that glittering, inexplicable woman, and thought of her roles,
Douglass asked himself: "How will she meet me to-morrow? What will be
the light in her eyes when she turns them upon me? Will she meet me
alone--haughty, weary with praise, or will she be surrounded by those
who bow to her as to a queen?" This latter thing he feared.

He had not been without experience with women--even with actresses; but
no woman he had ever met had appealed to his imagination beyond the
first meeting. Would it be so with Helen Merival? He had loved twice in
his life, but not well enough to say s