and watch her as if he drank her in.
Now and then he would laugh a little, and say, under his breath: "How
did I ever write it? How did it ever happen?"

Elise, on the other side of him, said, at last, "I knew you could do it,
Jimmie."

"You thought I could do great things. You never knew I could do--this--"

It was toward the end of the month that Duncan said to me one night as
we rode home on the top of a 'bus, "You don't suppose that he--"

"Elise thinks it," I said. "It's waking her up."

Elise and Jimmie had been married fifteen years, and had never had a
honeymoon, not in the sense that Jimmie wanted it--an adventure in
romance, to some spot where they could forget the world of work, the
world of sordid things, the world that was making Jimmie old. Every
summer Jimmie had asked for it, and always Elise had said, "Wait."

But now it was Elise who began to plan. "When your play is produced,
we'll run away somewhere. Do you remember the place you always talked
about--up in the hills?"

He looked at her through his round glasses. "I can't get away from
this"--he waved his hand toward the stage.

"If it's a success you can, Jimmie."

"It will be a success. Ursula Simms is a wonder. Look at her, Elise.
Look at her!"

Duncan and I could look at nothing else. As many times as I had seen her
in the part, I came to it always eagerly. It was her great scene--where
the girl, breaking free from all that has bound her, takes the hand of
her vagabond lover and goes forth, leaving behind wealth and a marriage
of distinction, that she may wander across the moors and down on the
sands, with the wild wind in her face, the stars for a canopy!

It tugged at our hearts. It would tug, we knew, at the heart of any
audience. It was the human nature in us all which responded. Not one of
us but would have broken bonds. Oh, youth, youth! Is there anything like
it in the whole wide world?

I do not think that it tugged at the heart of Elise. Her heart was not
like that. It was a stay-at-home heart. A workaday-world heart. Elise
would never under any circumstance have gone forth with a vagabond on a
wild night.

But here was Ursula doing it every day. On the evening of the first
dress-rehearsal she wore clothes that showed her sense of fitness. As if
in casting off conventional restraints, she renounced conventional
attire; she came down to her lover wrapped in a cloak of the deep-purple
bloom of the heather of the moor, and t