great, and was greatly in fashion at that period. This admixture of an aristocratic element with the mob was a good sign, and showed that the popularity of the show was extending to London. The fame of Gwynplaine must have penetrated into the great world. Such was the fact. Nothing was talked of but the Laughing Man. He was the subject of comment even at the Mohawk Club, frequented by noblemen.
The inmates of the Green Box had no idea of all this. They were content to be happy. It was bliss to Dea to touch, as she did every evening, the crisp, tawny locks of Gwynplaine. In love there is nothing like habit. The whole of life is concentrated in it. The reappearance of the stars is the custom of the universe. Creation is nothing but a mistress, and the sun a lover. Light is a dazzling caryatide supporting the world. Every day, for one sublime moment, the earth shrouded by night rests on the rising sun. Dea, blind, felt a similar return of warmth and hope within her when she placed her hand on Gwynplaine's head. To adore each other in seclusion, to love in the plenitude of silence,—who would not be reconciled to such an eternity?
One evening Gwynplaine, feeling within him that overflow of felicity, which like the intoxication of perfumes causes a sort of delicious faintness, was strolling, as he usually did after the performance, in the meadow a few hundred yards from the Green Box. Sometimes in those high tides of feeling in our souls we feel that we would fain pour out the sensations of the overflowing heart. The night was dark but clear. The stars were shining. The whole fair-ground was deserted. Sleep and forgetfulness reigned in the vans which were scattered over the Tarrinzeau Field. One light alone was unextinguished. It was a lamp at the Tadcaster Inn, the door of which was left ajar to admit Gwynplaine on his return.
