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He glanced once or twice furtively at the handsome, unhappy-looking, richly furred woman beside him–no longer young, “past youth, but not past passion,” with much of the charm of youth lingering in her graceful erectness, her pretty hair, her delicate pallor.

She had told him feverishly that the only thing she cared for–had ever cared for–was art, success, fame. He had heard something like it often before.

He wished, with a half-sigh, that a little of that uneasy, egotistic ambition might have been instilled into the heart of Lenore, for whom he had a compassionate, bottled-up attachment of many years’ standing.

Poor Lenore! What an actress, and what a hopelessly womanly woman, still mourning the providential demise of an impossible brother who had lived on her.

She was on the stage now, looking about seventeen, all youth and garden hat and white muslin.

Marion’s face twitched. She was living her own youth over again.

There was a pause. Lenore picked a rose to gain time, and looked into the wings.

“Delacour!” roared the manager, bouncing up in his stall and then sitting down again.

“We cut it here,” said Lenore, advancing to the footlights, “and he doesn’t know. It is not his fault. He’s waiting for his cue. See, Mr. Delacour! Leave out that bit about the daisies, and come on at ‘happiness.'”

The understudy came on, and Marion’s heart thrust suddenly at her like a rapier, and left her for dead, staring in front of her.

This was no understudy. This was the original George of the drama when it was first acted. Marion saw the lover of her youth come on and kiss Lenore’s hand, with the same gesture with which he had once kissed hers–in the sunshine, in a Kentish garden, beside a lavender bush, with a bumble bee in it, ten endless years ago.

He was hardly changed–a little thinner, perhaps, but not a day older in his paint; the same reckless, debonair creature whom Marion had loved, who had wounded her and grieved her, whom she had discarded at last with bitter anger, whom she had never forgotten, whom she remembered with anguish.

The curtain was down before she recovered herself, and the conductor was waving his baton.

The manager turned to her with some excitement.

“If only he can keep it up!” he said. “Delacour puts life into the love-making. He makes love well, don’t you think?”

“Admirably.”

“If only he can keep it up!” repeated the manager.

Through the two acts which followed, the understudy kept it up. He did more. He acted with an intensity that made the rest of the play somewhat colourless. At the end of the scene at the Savoy, just before the curtain fell, he added a sentence of his own.

In a second, before she knew what she had done, Marion had sprung to her feet, and had said in a harsh, loud voice:

“That last sentence is not in the part.”

The play stopped. The hurrying waiters with dishes stood stock still and gaped, as astonished as if the interruption had been in real life. Some of the supers at the little tables in the background got up to see what was happening.

Delacour, wineglass in hand, came forward to the footlights, and their eyes met.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “You say it is not in the part. I thought it was. I will omit it in future.”

“You will do no such thing!” bawled the manager, leaping to his feet and shaking his fist at him. “Omit it! Why, Miss Wright, it’s an inspiration. Gets him the whole sympathy just at the critical moment. And what a curtain! Good God! What a curtain!”

“Isn’t it?” said Lenore. “Leave out my bit at the end altogether, and make that the curtain. Don’t you agree, Miss Wright? And, look here, Mr. Delacour, take the front centre here.”

“Start again at ‘falsehood,'” said the manager briskly to Lenore. “Now, then, everybody. Sit down at the back there. Now—-“