uld be no doubt
whatever; not a single white dress was in the row, and towards the
middle a seat was vacant. They had gone home then; he would not see her
again--and once more the provoking darkness enveloped the theatre.

This second act had no meaning for him, and he found the various scenes
intolerably long. Dove volunteered no further aid, and Madeleine's
explanations were insufficient; he was perplexed and bored, and when
the curtains fell, joined in the applause merely to save appearances.
The others rose, but he said he would not go downstairs; and when they
had drawn back to let Dove push by and hurry away, Madeleine said she,
too, would stay. However they would at least go into the corridor,
where the air was better. After they had promenaded several times up
and down, they descended to a lower floor and there, through a little
half-moon window that gave on the FOYER below, they watched the living
stream which, underneath, was going round as before. Madeleine talked
without a pause.

"Look at Dove!" She pointed him out as he went by with the two sisters.
"Did you ever see such a gloomy air? He might sit for Werther to-night.
And oh, look, there's Boehmer with his widow--see, the pretty fattish
little woman. She's over forty and has buried two husbands, but is
crazy about Boehmer. They say she's going to marry him, though he's
more than twenty years younger than she is."

At this juncture, to his astonishment, Maurice saw Schilsky and Louise.
He uttered an involuntary exclamation, and Madeleine understood it. She
stopped her gossip to say: "You thought she had gone, didn't you?
Probably she has only changed her seat. They do that sometimes--he
hates PARQUET." And, after a pause: "How cross she looks! She's
evidently in a temper about something. I never saw people hide their
feelings as badly as they do. It's positively indecent."

Her strictures were justifiable; as long as the two below were in
sight, and as often as they came round, they did not exchange word or
look with each other. Schilsky frowned sulkily, and his loose-knitted
body seemed to hang together more loosely than usual, while as for
Louise--Maurice staring hard from his point of vantage could not have
believed it possible for her face to change in this way. She looked
suddenly older, and very tired; and her mobile mouth was hard.

When, an hour later, after a tedious colloquy between Brunnhilde and
Wotan, this long and disappointing evening