ess, he wished there were a rest behind
it; and how indifferently, how critically, how levelly he surveyed the
fluttered house, and the figures in the box beside him! How foreign he
appeared to the ardent spirit who had dominated the dark; how emptied of
the heat of imagination, how worn, how dry; and even in his salience,
how singularly pathetic! He was neither the satanic person of the first
night, nor her comrade of the Presidio hills. And if the expression of
his face was not quite so cheap as cynicism, it was just the absence of
belief in anything.

She felt a lump in her throat, an ache of the cruelest disappointment,
as though some masker, masking as the fire of life, had suddenly removed
the covering of his face and showed her the burnt-out bones beneath. The
shift from what she remembered him to what he now appeared was too rapid
and considerable for her. She found herself looking at him through a
mist of tears--there in the heart of publicity, in the middle of the
circle of red velvet curtains!

He turned and saw her. She watched a smile of the frankest pleasure
rising, as it were, to the surface of his weary preoccupation. Something
had delighted him. Why, it was herself--just her being there! And she
could only helplessly blink at him. Was ever anything so stupid as to be
caught in tears over nothing! For the next moment he had caught her. She
knew by the change of his look, interrogative, amused, incredulous. He
straightened and leaned forward.

"Really," he said, "you must remember that little man has only gone out
for a glass of beer."

So he thought it was the tenor who had brought her to the point of
tears.

"Ah, why do you say that?" she protested.

He continued to smile indulgently upon her. "Would you really rather
believe it true?"

"I don't know. But I wish _you_ hadn't thought of the beer."

He brought the glare of his monocle to bear full upon her. "Why not? It
is all we make sure of."

So he had taken that side of it. By his words as well as his looks he
repudiated all the gallant show of romance he had paraded to her before,
and had taken up the cause of the world as flatly as Harry could have
done.

"Oh, if to be sure is all you want," she burst out; "but you don't mean
it! Wouldn't you rather have something beautiful you weren't sure of,
than something certain that didn't matter?"

He nodded to this quite casually, as if it were an old acquaintance.

"Oh, yes; but the time com