about her cousin. For in all the excitement, it seemed that in some way she herself had at last escaped the tradition that made a vigorous, unmarried woman into a grim, forbidding dreadnought.
Miss Ogilvie too shared the triumph though in a different fashion. It was she, after all, who had discovered Lilli Barr; but it was not this which warmed her fluttering heart so much as the old secret of the missing five hours, which even now she shared with no one. It was Miss Ogilvie—poor, timid, Miss Ogilvie—trapped like Cousin Eva Barr in the tradition of an earlier generation, who had helped this Lilli Barr to escape. And in her thoughts (she being a sentimental creature and knowing nothing of the truth) the little parlor took on a new glow of romance and glamour. At times, when her secret seemed almost too difficult to keep, she fancied that some day, after she herself was dead, they might place on the front of her house a little tablet with an inscription which read, "It was from this house on the Fifth of January, 1903, that Lilli Barr (then Ellen Tolliver) eloped . . . etc. etc."
So, in the first years of her fame, Ellen remained a little dazed by her success. She moved, terrified always on the eve of a concert, going between concerts her hard-working, secretive way, so that there grew up about her, in addition to all Rebecca's marvelous lies, a legend of mystery. Few people knew her or anything at all of her real life. There were only the gaudy stories of Rebecca's fabrication which people believed and yet did not believe because there were so many of them and they were all so conflicting. In place of the old coldness and restraint, which melted only when Ellen's fingers touched the keyboard of a Bechstein or a Steinway, Rebecca managed to create such a sense of splendor and unmorality that presently the newspapers, as old Sanson had done long ago, came to speak of her as a second Teresa Carreño.
She caught too from Rebecca something of the latter's con-
