could hardly be, for these things seemed to frighten her.  At times one could see her shrink and grow pale at some great clapping or loud “Again!” And only upon the stage did the town behold her.  She rarely went abroad, and at the small white house in Palace Street she was denied to visitors.  True, ’twas the way to keep upon curiosity the keenest edge, to pique interest and send the town to the playhouse as the one point of view from which the riddle might be studied.  But wisdom such as this could scarce be expected of the girl.  Given, then, that ’twas not her vanity which kept her Darden’s Audrey, what was it?  Was not Mr. Haward of Fair View rich, handsome, a very fine gentleman?  Generous, too, for had he not sworn, as earnestly as though he expected to be believed, that the girl was pure innocence?  His hand was ready to his sword, nor were men anxious to incur his cold enmity, so that the assertion passed without open challenge.  He was mad for her,—­that was plain enough.  And she,—­well she’s woman and Darden’s Audrey, and so doubly an enigma.  In the mean time, to-night she plays Monimia, and her madness makes you weep, so sad it is, so hopeless, and so piercing sweet.

In this new world that was so strange to her Darden’s Audrey bore herself as best she might.  While it was day she kept within the house, where the room that in September she had shared with Mistress Deborah was now for her alone.  Hour after hour she sat there, book in hand, learning how those other women, those women of the past, had loved, had suffered, had fallen to dusty death.  Other hours she spent with Mr. Charles Stagg in the long room downstairs, or, when Mistress Stagg had customers, in the theatre itself.  As in the branded schoolmaster chance had given her a teacher skilled in imparting knowledge, so in this small and pompous man, who beneath a garb of fustian hugged to himself a genuine reverence and understanding of his art, she found an instructor more able, perhaps, than had been a greater actor.  In the chill and empty playhouse, upon the narrow stage where, sitting in the September sunshine, she had asked of Haward her last favor, she now learned to speak for those sisters of her spirit, those dead women who through rapture, agony, and madness had sunk to their long rest, had given their hands to death and lain down in a common inn.  To Audrey they were real; she was free of their company.  The shadows were the people who lived and were happy; who night after night came to watch a soul caught in the toils, to thunder applause when death with rude and hasty hands broke the net, set free the prisoner.

The girl dreamed as she breathed.  Wakened from a long, long fantasy, desolate and cold to the heart in an alien air, she sought for poppy and mandragora, and in some sort finding them dreamed again, though not for herself, not as before.  It can hardly be said that she was unhappy.  She walked in a pageant of strange miseries, and the pomp of woe was hers to portray.  Those changelings from some fateful land, those passionate, pale women, the milestones of whose pilgrimage spelled love, ruin, despair, and death, they were her kindred, her sisters.  Day and night they kept her company:  and her own pain lessened, grew at last to a still and dreamy sorrow, never absent, never poignant.