u send me away! I
will read to you with pleasure. What will you have?"

She handed him a little volume of poems; he glanced at the title and
made a faint grimace. They were his own.

Nevertheless, he read for an hour, till the streets below grew silent,
and his own voice, unaccustomed to such exercise, lost something of
its usual clearness. Then he laid the volume down, and there was
silence between them.

"I have been thinking," he said at last, "of a singular incident in
connection with your performance at the New Theatre; it was brought
into my mind just then. I meant to have mentioned it before."

She looked up with only a slight show of interest. Those days at the
theatre seemed to her now to be very far behind. There was nothing in
connection with them which she cared to remember.

"It was the night of my first visit there," he continued. "There is a
terrible scene at the end of the second act between Herdrine and her
husband--you recollect it, of course. Just as you finished your
denunciation, I distinctly heard a curious cry from the back of the
house. It was a greater tribute to your acting than the applause, for
it was genuine."

"The piece was gloomy enough," she remarked, "to have dissolved the
house in tears."

"At least," he said, "it wrung the heart of one man. For I have
not told you all. I was interested enough to climb up into the
amphitheatre. The man sat there alone amongst a wilderness of empty
seats. He was the picture of abject misery. I could scarcely see his
face, but his attitude was convincing. It was not a thing of chance
either. I made some remark about him to an attendant, and he told me
that night after night that man had occupied the same seat, always
following every line of the play with the same mournful concentration,
never speaking to any one, never moving from his seat from the
beginning of the play to the end."

"He must have been," she declared, "a person of singularly morbid
taste. When I think of it now I shiver. I would not play Herdrine
again for worlds."

"I am very glad to hear you say so," he said, smiling. "Do you know
that to me the most interesting feature of the play was its obvious
effect upon this man. Its extreme pessimism is too much paraded, is
laid on altogether with too thick a hand to ring true. The thing is
an involved nightmare. One feels that as a work of art it is never
convincing, yet underneath it all there must be something human, for
it found