and yet he knew it not.  He was as one demented.  This was Gertrude White—­speaking, walking, smiling, a fire of beauty in her clear eyes; her parted lips when she laughed letting the brilliant light just touch for an instant the milk-white teeth.  This was no pale Rose Leaf at all—­no dream or vision—­but the actual laughing, talking, beautiful woman, who had more than ever of that strange grace and witchery about her that had fascinated him when first he saw her.  She was so near that he could have thrown a rose to her—­a red rose, full blown and full scented.  He forgave the theatre—­or rather he forgot it—­in the unimaginable delight of being so near her.  And when at length she left the stage, he had no jealousy of the poor people who remained there to go through their marionette business.  He hoped they might all become great actors and actresses.  He even thought he would try to get to understand the story—­seeing he should have nothing else to do until Gertrude White came back again.

Now Keith Macleod was no more ignorant or innocent than anybody else; but there was one social misdemeanor—­mere peccadillo, let us say—­that was quite unintelligible to him.  He could not understand how a man could go flirting after a married woman; and still less could he understand how a married woman should, instead of attending to her children and her house and such matters, make herself ridiculous by aping girlhood and pretending to have a lover.  He had read a great deal about this, and he was told it was common; but he did not believe it.  The same authorities assured him that the women of England were drunkards in secret; he did not believe it.  The same authorities insisted that the sole notion of marriage that occupied the head of an English girl of our own day was as to how she should sell her charms to the highest bidder; he did not believe that either.  And indeed he argued with himself, in considering to what extent books and plays could be trusted in such matters, that in one obvious case the absurdity of these allegations was proved.  If France were the France of French playwrights and novelists, the whole business of the country would come to a standstill.  If it was the sole and constant occupation of every adult Frenchman to run after his neighbor’s wife, how could bridges be built, taxes collected, fortifications planned?  Surely a Frenchman must sometimes think, if only by accident, of something other than his neighbor’s wife?  Macleod laughed to himself in the solitude of Castle Dare, and contemptuously flung the unfinished paper-covered novel aside.

But what was his surprise and indignation—­his shame, even—­on finding that this very piece in which Gertrude White was acting was all about a jealous husband, and a gay and thoughtless wife, and a villain who did not at all silently plot her ruin, but frankly confided his aspirations to a mutual friend, and rather sought for sympathy; while she, Gertrude White herself, had, before all these people, to listen