r; that one of the thin cords
supporting it might snap, and let her go headlong from the dizzy height.
Now and then, for a terrible instant, he would imagine her lying a
glittering, palpitating heap at the foot-lights, with no color in her
lips! Sometimes it seemed as if the girl were tempting this kind of
fate. It was a hard, bitter life, and nothing but poverty and sordid
misery at home could have driven her to it. What if she should end it
all some night, by just unclasping that little hand? It looked so small
and white from where Van Twiller sat!

This frightful idea fascinated while it chilled him, and helped to
make it nearly impossible for him to keep away from the theatre. In the
beginning his attendance had not interfered with his social duties or
pleasures; but now he came to find it distasteful after dinner to do
anything but read, or walk the streets aimlessly, until it was time to
go to the play. When that was over, he was in no mood to go anywhere but
to his rooms. So he dropped away by insensible degrees from his habitual
haunts, was missed, and began to be talked about at the club. Catching
some intimation of this, he ventured no more in the orchestra stalls,
but shrouded himself behind the draperies of the private box in which
Delaney and I thought we saw him on one occasion.

Now, I find it very perplexing to explain what Van Twiller was wholly
unable to explain to himself. He was not in love with Mademoiselle
Olympe. He had no wish to speak to her, or to hear her speak. Nothing
could have been easier, and nothing further from his desire, than
to know her personally. A Van Twiller personally acquainted with a
strolling female acrobat! Good heavens I That was something possible
only with the discovery of perpetual motion. Taken from her theatrical
setting, from her lofty perch, so to say, on the trapeze-bar, Olympe
Zabriski would have shocked every aristocratic fibre in Van Twiller's
body. He was simply fascinated by her marvellous grace and _elan_, and
the magnetic recklessness of the girl. It was very young in him and very
weak, and no member of the Sorosis, or all the Sorosisters together,
could have been more severe on Van Twiller than he was on himself. To be
weak, and to know it, is something of a punishment for a proud man. Van
Twiller took his punishment, and went to the theatre, regularly.

"When her engagement comes to an end," he meditated, "that will finish
the business."

Mademoiselle O