cluded, and John saw Miss Dounay for the first time in the dress of the character, his soul was enraptured. The simple folds of her Grecian robe were furled at the waist and then swept downward in one billowy leap, unrelieved in their impressive whiteness by any touch of color, save that afforded by the jet-bright eyes with their assumed worshipful look and the wide, flowing stream of her dark, luxuriant hair, which, loosely bound at the neck, waved downward to her hips. The devout curve of her alabaster neck, the gleaming shoulders, the full, tapering, ivory arms, her sandaled bare feet—yes, John looked close to make sure, and they were actually bare—rounded out the picture.
Marien Dounay stood forth more like an angel vision than a woman, at once so beautiful and so adorable that big, sincere, open-eyed John Hampstead worshipped her where she stood—worshipped her and loved her—as a man should love an angel. Yet as he looked, he was almost guiltily conscious that he knew a secret about this angelic vision,—that this chiseled flesh with rounded, shapely contours that would be the despair of any sculptor was not as marble-like as it looked, was, indeed, soft to the touch and warm, radiant and magnetic.
And John, blissfully aglow with his spiritual ardor, had no faint suspicion that his secret might kill his illusion dead, nor that his devotion would survive that decease, although something very like this happened on the night of the first performance.
The great second act was on. Things were not going as smoothly as they appeared to from the front. Even the inexperienced Hampstead, as he waited for his cue, could see that his angel was being enormously vexed by the manner in which Vinicius made love. Henry Lester was a brilliant actor, but flighty and erratic. During rehearsal Mowrey had much trouble in getting him
