or by an
attendant into a theater box, she accepted that as another of these
things into which she could not inquire; things that happened to her
outside of her volition and directed by authorities which she could not
control.

The staging of the opera refined and extended the illusion that she had
been transported out of the world by some occult agency. The wonderful
creature that had taken her up out of her abandoned misery before the
sordid shop-shutter appeared now in a fairy costume glittering with
jewels. And the gnomes, the monsters and goblins appearing about her
were all fabulous creatures, as the girl herself seemed a fabulous
creature.

She sighed like one who must awaken from the splendor of a dream to
realities of which the sleeper is vaguely conscious. Only the girl's
voice seemed real. It seemed some great, heavenly reality like the
sunlight or the sweep of the sea. It filled the packed places of the
theater. She sang and one believed again in the benevolence of heaven;
in immortal love. To the distressed woman effacing herself in the corner
of the empty box it was all a sort of inconceivable witch-work.

And it was witch-work, as potent if not as amply fitted with dramatic
properties as the witchwork of ancient legend.

The daughter of an obscure juge d'instruction of the Canton of Vaud,
singing in a Swiss meadow, had been taken up by a wealthy American,
traveling in Switzerland on an April morning-old, enervated with the sun
of the Riviera, and displeased with life. And this rich old woman, her
rheumatic fingers loaded with jewels, had transformed the daughter of
the juge d'instruction of the Canton of Vaud into a singing wonder that
made every human creature see again the dreams of his youth before him
leading into the Elysian Fields.

And to the girl herself this transformation also seemed the wonder
of witch-work. Her early life lay so far below in a world remote and
detached; a little house in a village of the Canton of Vaud with
the genteel poverty that attended the slender salary of a juge
d'instruction, and the weight of duties that accumulated on her
shoulders. Her father's life was given over to the labors of criminal
investigation, but it was a field that returned nothing in the way of
material gain. Honorable mention, a medal, the distinction of having his
reports copied into the official archives, were the fruits of the man's
life. She remembered the minutely exhaustive details of thos