that Van Twiller found himself taking his seat
in the back part of the private box night after night during the second
engagement of Mademoiselle Olympe. It was so easy not to stay away!

In this second edition of Van Twiller's fatuity, his case was even
worse than before. He not only thought of Olympo quite a number of
times between breakfast and dinner, he not only attended the interlude
regularly, but he began, in spite of himself, to occupy his leisure
hours at night by dreaming of her. This was too much of a good thing,
and Van Twiller regarded it so. Besides, the dream was always the
same--a harrowing dream, a dream singularly adapted to shattering the
nerves of a man like Van Twiller. He would imagine himself seated at the
theatre (with all the members of Our Club in the parquette), watching
Mademoiselle Olympe as usual, when suddenly that young lady would launch
herself desperately from the trapeze, and come flying through the air
like a firebrand hurled at his private box. Then the unfortunate man
would wake up with cold drops standing on his forehead.

There is one redeeming feature in this infatuation of Van Twiller's
which the sober moralist will love to look upon--the serene
unconsciousness of the person who caused it. She went through her _role_
with admirable aplomb, drew her salary, it may be assumed, punctually,
and appears from first to last to have been ignorant that there was
a miserable slave wearing her chains nightly in the left-hand
proscenium-box.

That Van Twiller, haunting the theatre with the persistency of an
ex-actor, conducted himself so discreetly as not to draw the fire of
Mademoiselle Olympe's blue eyes shows that Van Twiller, however deeply
under a spell, was not in love. I say this, though I think if Van
Twiller had not been Van Twiller, if he had been a man of no family and
no position and no money, if New York had been Paris and Thirty-fourth
Street a street in the Latin Quarter--but it is useless to speculate on
what might have happened. What did happen is sufficient.

It happened, then, in the second week of Queen Olympe's second
unconscious reign, that an appalling Whisper floated up the Hudson,
effected a landing at a point between Spuyten Duyvel Creek and Cold
Spring, and sought out a stately mansion of Dutch architecture standing
on the bank of the river. The Whisper straightway informed the lady
dwelling in this mansion that all was not well with the last of the Van
Twill