mpass
of its five acts she runs the wild and weary gamut from crowned love
to crowned despair. It is a new interpretation, and a remarkable
one--an interpretation that is tinged with the blight of our
inquisitive and mournful age: self-consciousness, that terrible
tormentor in her soul, sits for ever in judgment upon every impulse
of the heart of Adrienne, and makes of pain a stinging poison, and
of pleasure but a poor potentiality. Her death-scene is singular and
awful--awful in its physical adherence to realism, and singular in
that it does not disgust, or even horrify, but leaves a memory of
peace with the listener, who has not failed to catch the last strain
for sight of the divine and dying eyes." So the critic of the London
oracle wrote of Hyacinthe King.

That night the people had crowned her with a wreath of gold
laurel-leaves, and she was walking to her dressing-room, when, as she
passed the green-room door, a merry laugh made her glance in. There
were fifty people there--actors, journalists, swells and hangers-on
of the playhouse. A little to the right of the group, and talking
and laughing with two or three others, stood a man both young and
handsome.

Hyacinthe went toward him, and the people, unused to seeing her there
for a long time past, hushed their talk, and one of them marked the
newness of the light that shone in her eyes and the happiness that
smiled on her lips as she came. He was a poet, and he went home and
made verses on her: he had never thought of such a thing before. She
raised the wreath of laurel from her brows and lifted it up to the
golden head of the man whose laugh she had caught. "My Saxon god!" she
murmured, so low that none heard her save him, and then, leaving the
crown on his head, she turned and walked away. She went home to the
shabby house in Craven street, which was still her home, and before
she slept she whispered to Miss Juliet, "I have found him."

In less than twenty-four hours the scene enacted in the green-room of
the theatre had been reported everywhere--first in the clubs, then
in all the salons--not last in the pretty boudoir of Lady Florence
Ffolliott.

Every night thereafter Hyacinthe saw her hero sitting in his stall: he
never missed once, but generally came in well on toward the end of the
performance. At the close of a fortnight, as she was making her way to
her room after the curtain had come down for the last time, she met
him face to face: he had planned