Mr. Douglass, but as she left orders—"

When the boy with his card had disappeared into the candy-colored distances, the playwright found himself again studying the face of his incomprehensible sorceress, who looked down upon him even at that moment from a bulletin-board on the hotel wall, Oriental, savage, and sullen—sad, too, as though alone in her solitary splendor. "She can't be all of her parts—which one of them will I find as I enter her room?" he asked himself for the hundredth time.

"Miss Merival will see Mr. Douglass," said the bell-boy. "This way, sir."

As he stepped into the elevator the young man's face grew stern and his lips straightened out into a grim line. It was absurd to think he should be so deeply moved by any woman alive, he who prided himself on his self-possession.

Down a long hall on the tenth floor the boy led him, and tapped at a door, which was opened after a pause by a quiet woman who greeted him with outstretched hand, kindly cordial.

"How do you do, Mr. Douglass? It is very good of you to come," she said, with the simplest inflection.

"This must be an elder sister," he thought, and followed her into a large sitting-room, where a gray-haired woman and a young man were sipping after-dinner coffee.

"Mother, this is Mr. Douglass, the author of The Modern Stage, the little book of essays we liked so well." The elderly lady greeted him cordially, but with a timid air. "And this is my brother Hugh," the young man gave Douglass's hand a firm and cordial grip.

"Sit down, please—not there—over here, where the light will fall on you. I want to see how you look," she added, in smiling candor; and with that smile he recognized in his hostess the great actress.

He was fairly dazed, and for the moment entirely wordless. From the very moment the door had opened to him the "glittering woman" had been receding into remote and ever remoter distances, for the Helen Merival before him was as simple, candid, and cordial as his own sister. Her voice had the home inflection; she displayed neither paint nor powder; her hair was plainly brushed—beautiful hair it was, too—and her dress was lovely and in quiet taste.

Her face seemed plain at first, just as her stature seemed small. She was dark, but not so dark as she appeared on the stage, and her face was thinner, a little careworn, it seemed to him; and her 

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