age, who were loitering leisurely by
the wall, unwilling to compromise themselves by actually sitting down,
took heart of grace at this correct apparition. Brimmer nodded to them
coolly, as if on 'Change, and made his way out of the theatre. He had
scarcely taken a few steps before a furious onset of wind and rain drove
him into a doorway for shelter. At the same moment a slouching figure,
with a turned-up coat-collar, slipped past him and disappeared in a
passage at his right. Partly hidden by his lowered umbrella, Mr. Brimmer
himself escaped notice, but he instantly recognized his late companion,
Markham. As he resumed his way up the street he glanced into the
passage. Halfway down, a light flashed upon the legend "Stage Entrance."
Quincy Brimmer, with a faint smile, passed on to his hotel.

It was striking half-past eleven when Mr. Brimmer again issued from his
room in the Oriental and passed down a long corridor. Pausing a moment
before a side hall that opened from it, he cast a rapid look up and down
the corridor, and then knocked hastily at a door. It was opened sharply
by a lady's maid, who fell back respectfully before Mr. Brimmer's
all-correct presence.

Half reclining on a sofa in the parlor of an elaborate suite of
apartments was the woman whom Mr. Brimmer had a few hours before beheld
on the stage of the theatre. Lifting her eyes languidly from a book that
lay ostentatiously on her lap, she beckoned her visitor to approach.
She was a woman still young, whose statuesque beauty had but slightly
suffered from cosmetics, late hours, and the habitual indulgence of
certain hysterical emotions that were not only inconsistent with the
classical suggestions of her figure, but had left traces not unlike the
grosser excitement of alcoholic stimulation. She looked like a tinted
statue whose slight mutations through stress of time and weather had
been unwisely repaired by freshness of color.

"I am such a creature of nerves," she said, raising a superb neck and
extending a goddess-like arm, "that I am always perfectly exhausted
after the performance. I fly, as you see, to my first love--poetry--as
soon as Rosina has changed my dress. It is not generally known--but
I don't mind telling YOU--that I often nerve myself for the effort of
acting by reading some well-remembered passage from my favorite poets,
as I stand by the wings. I quaff, as one might say, a single draught of
the Pierian spring before I go on."

The exa