Whether I resisted my infatuation, or whether I submitted to it,
I still longed for her. I did all I could to conceal the state of
my mind from my mother. But her loving eyes discovered the
secret: she saw that I suffered, and suffered with me. More than
once she said: "George, the good end is not to be gained by
traveling; let us go home." More than once I answered, with the
bitter and obstinate resolution of despair: "No. Let us try more
new people and more new scenes." It was only when I found her
health and strength beginning to fail under the stress of
continual traveling that I consented to abandon the hopeless
search after oblivion, and to turn homeward at last.

I prevailed on my mother to wait and rest at my house in London
before she returned to her favorite abode at the country-seat in
Perthshire. It is needless to say that I remained in town with
her. My mother now represented the one interest that held me
nobly and endearingly to life. Politics, literature,
agriculture--the customary pursuits of a man in my position--had
none of them the slightest attraction for me.

We had arrived in London at what is called "the height of the
season." Among the operatic attractions of that year--I am
writing of the days when the ballet was still a popular form of
public entertainment--there was a certain dancer whose grace and
beauty were the objects of universal admiration. I was asked if I
had seen her, wherever I went, until my social position, as the
one man who was indifferent to the reigning goddess of the stage,
became quite unendurable. On the next occasion when I was invited
to take a seat in a friend's box, I accepted the proposal; and
(far from willingly) I went the way of the world--in other words,
I went to the opera.

The first part of the performance had concluded when we got to
the theater, and the ballet had not yet begun. My friends amused
themselves with looking for familiar faces in the boxes and
stalls. I took a chair in a corner and waited, with my mind far
away from the theater, from the dancing that was to come. The
lady who sat nearest to me (like ladies in general) disliked the
neighborhood of a silent man. She determined to make me talk to
her.

"Do tell me, Mr. Germaine," she said. "Did you ever see a theater
anywhere so full as this theater is to-night?"

She handed me her opera-glass as she spoke. I moved to the front
of the box to look at the audience.

It was certainty a wonderful sight. Every available atom of space
(as I gradually raised the glass from the floor to the ceiling of
the building) appeared to be occupied. Looking upward and upward,
my range of view gradually reached the gallery. Even at that
distance, the excellent glass which had been put into my hands
brought the faces of the audience close to me. I looked first at
the pe rsons who occupied the front row of seats in the gallery
stalls.

Moving the opera-glass slowly along the semicircle formed by the
seats, I suddenly stopped when I reached the middle.

My heart gave a great leap as if it would bound out of my body.
There was no mistaking _that_ face among the commonplace faces
near it. I had discovered Mrs. Van Brandt!

She sat in front--but not alone. There was a man in the stall
immediately behind her, who bent over her and spoke to her from
time to time. She listened to him, so far as I could see, with
something of a sad and weary look. Who was the man? I might, or
might not, find that out. Under any circumstances, I determined
to speak to Mrs. Van Brandt.

The curtain rose for the ballet. I made the best excuse I could
to my friends, and instantly left the box.

It was useless to attempt to purchase my admission to the
gallery. My money was refused. There was not even standing room
left in that part of the theater.

But one alternative remained. I returned to the street, to wait
for Mrs. Van Brandt at the gallery door until the performance was
over.

Who was the man in attendance on her--the man whom I had seen
sitting behind her, and talking familiarly over her shoulder?
While I paced backward and forward before the door, that one
question held possession of my mind, until the oppression of it
grew beyond endurance. I went back to my friends in the box,
simply and solely to look at the man again.

What excuses I made to account for my strange conduct I cannot
now remember. Armed once more with the lady's opera-glass (I
borrowed it and kept it without scruple), I alone, of all that
vast audience, turned my back on the stage, and riveted my
attention on the gallery stalls.

There he sat, in his place behind her, to all appearance
spell-bound by the fascinations of the graceful dancer. Mrs. Van
Brandt, on the contrary, seemed to find but little attraction in
the spectacle presented by the stage. She looked at the dancing
(so far as I could see) in an absent, weary manner. When the
applause broke out in a perfect frenzy of cries and clapping of


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