arvest of
experience. A love like his might have given her the divine gift of
self-renewal; and now he saw her fated to wane into old age repeating
the same gestures, echoing the words she had always heard, and
perhaps never guessing that, just outside her glazed and curtained
consciousness, life rolled away, a vast blackness starred with lights,
like the night landscape beyond the windows of the train.

The engine lowered its speed for the passage through a sleeping station.
In the light of the platform lamp Darrow looked across at his companion.
Her head had dropped toward one shoulder, and her lips were just far
enough apart for the reflection of the upper one to deepen the colour
of the other. The jolting of the train had again shaken loose the lock
above her ear. It danced on her cheek like the flit of a brown wing over
flowers, and Darrow felt an intense desire to lean forward and put it
back behind her ear.

IV

As their motor-cab, on the way from the Gare du Nord, turned into the
central glitter of the Boulevard, Darrow had bent over to point out an
incandescent threshold.

"There!"

Above the doorway, an arch of flame flashed out the name of a great
actress, whose closing performances in a play of unusual originality
had been the theme of long articles in the Paris papers which Darrow had
tossed into their compartment at Calais.

"That's what you must see before you're twenty-four hours older!"

The girl followed his gesture eagerly. She was all awake and alive now,
as if the heady rumours of the streets, with their long effervescences
of light, had passed into her veins like wine.

"Cerdine? Is that where she acts?" She put her head out of the window,
straining back for a glimpse of the sacred threshold. As they flew past
it she sank into her seat with a satisfied sigh.

"It's delicious enough just to KNOW she's there! I've never seen her,
you know. When I was here with Mamie Hoke we never went anywhere but to
the music halls, because she couldn't understand any French; and when
I came back afterward to the Farlows' I was dead broke, and couldn't
afford the play, and neither could they; so the only chance we had was
when friends of theirs invited us--and once it was to see a tragedy by
a Roumanian lady, and the other time it was for 'L'Ami Fritz' at the
Francais."

Darrow laughed. "You must do better than that now. 'Le Vertige' is a
fine thing, and Cerdine gets some wonderful effects out o