the stage her eyes had for a moment met Matravers' earnest
gaze, and Ellison could almost have declared that a faint, welcoming
light flashed for a moment from the woman to the man. Yet he was sure
that the two were strangers. They had never met--her very name had
been unknown to him. It must have been his fancy.

The curtain fell upon the second and final act amidst as much applause
as the sparsely filled theatre could offer; but mingled with it,
almost as the last words of her final speech had left her lips, came a
curious hoarse cry from somewhere in the cheaper seats near the back
of the house. It was heard very distinctly in every part; it rang out
upon the deep quivering stillness which reigns for a second between
the end of a play which has left the audience spellbound, and the
burst of applause which is its first reawakening instinct. It was
drowned in less than a moment, yet many people turned their startled
heads towards the rows of back seats. Matravers, one of the first to
hear it, was one of the most interested--perhaps because his sensitive
ears had recognized in it that peculiar inflection, the true ring of
earnestness. For it was essentially a human cry, a cry of sorrow, a
strange note charged in its very hoarseness and spontaneity with an
unutterable pathos. It was as though it had been actually drawn from
the heart to the lips, and long after the house had become deserted,
Matravers stood there, his hands resting upon the edge of the box, and
his dark face turned steadfastly to that far-away corner, where it
seemed to him that he could see a solitary, human figure, sitting with
bowed head amongst the wilderness of empty seats.

Ellison touched him upon the elbow.

"You must come with me and be presented to Berenice," he said.

Matravers shook his head.

"Please excuse me," he said; "I would really rather not."

Ellison held out a crumpled half-sheet of notepaper.

"This has just been brought in to me," he said.

Matravers read the single line, hastily written, and in pencil:--

"Bring your friend to me.--B."

"It will scarcely take us a moment," Ellison continued. "Don't stop to
put on your coat; we are the last in the theatre now."

Matravers, whose will was usually a very dominant one, found himself
calmly obeying his companion. Following Ellison, he was bustled down a
long, narrow passage, across a bare wilderness of boards and odd
pieces of scenery, to the door of a room immediatel