o do what you
can in consoling your fair neighbor and reconciling _her_ to the
inevitable." Louise did not know whether this was ironical or not, and
she did not at all like the laugh from Maxwell which greeted the
suggestion.

"_I_ shall have to reconcile Sterne, and I don't believe that will be
half so easy."

The manager's words were gloomy, but there was an imaginable relief in
his tone and a final cheerfulness in his manner. He left the Maxwells to
a certain embarrassment in each other's presence. Louise was the first
to break the silence that weighed upon them both.

"Brice, did you decide that way to please me?"

"I am not such a fool," said Maxwell.

"Because," she said, "if you did, you did very wrong, and I don't
believe any good could come of it."

Yet she did not seem altogether averse to the risks involved; and in
fact she could not justly accuse herself of what had happened, however
devoutly she had wished for such a consummation.

XXV.

It was Miss Havisham and not Godolphin who appeared to the public as
having ended the combination their managers had formed. The interviewing
on both sides continued until the interest of the quarrel was lost in
that of the first presentation of the play, when the impression that
Miss Havisham had been ill-used was effaced by the impression made by
Miss Pettrell in the part of Salome. Her performance was not only
successful in the delicacy and refinement which her friends expected of
her, but she brought to the work a vivid yet purely feminine force which
took them by surprise and made the public her own. No one in the house
could have felt, as the Maxwells felt, a certain quality in it which it
would be extremely difficult to characterize without overstating it.
Perhaps Louise felt this more even than her husband, for when she
appealed to him, he would scarcely confess to a sense of it; but from
time to time in the stronger passages she was aware of an echo, to the
ear and to the eye, of a more passionate personality than Miss
Pettrell's. Had Godolphin profited by his knowledge of Miss Havisham's
creation, and had he imparted to Miss Pettrell, who never saw it, hints
of it which she used in her own creation of the part? If he had, just
what was the measure and the nature of his sin? Louise tormented herself
with this question, while a sense of the fact went as often as it came,
and left her in a final doubt of it. What was certain was that if
Godolphin