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Rh firelight as a background for her dark head and proud shoulders, and finally folded around her as she strayed out into a stage snow-storm, it had played an almost human part. But she knew and he knew the exultation his words covered.

"This is only the beginning," he had said, the next afternoon, as he called at her hotel sitting room, noted the bouquets that banked her mantelpiece, and reread the flattering notices in the newspapers.

Only the beginning!

The woman who knelt in the glow of the October sunset looked down at the sapphire-blue cloak where it lay, camphor-scented, wrinkled, its folds undisturbed these four years past. She looked around at the attic storeroom, with its cedar chests, its rows of red chintz piece bags, its atmosphere of housewifely care. She rose, and walking to the window, let her eyes wander over the neat lawn, the immaculate gravel path and trim nasturtium beds, and then to the little Queen Ame villa opposite, whose irregular porticoes, golden-brown gables, and crisp, white muslin curtains, reproduced the house she lived in like the image in a looking-glass. The image of a happy home, she told herself, as she, in her soft gray house gown with its spotless collar and cuffs, was the picture of a happy matron. And in truth, she had been very happy in that pretty home and its placid, sheltered life,—so happy that only the evening before, sitting silently with her husband in the twilight, she had laughed softly at the memory of her manager's bitter prophecy at parting four years ago,—his prediction of the vain regret she would one day feel for the career she had, as he put it, "thrown over for a passing fancy." To-day, too, she laughed at the memory—but with a difference; for now her accent was all that of the stage world; and suddenly the laughter broke into sobs, and the happy woman's dark head drooped upon her heaving breast.

As she raised both hands to brush away the tears, a bit of paper fell from her unconsciously clenched fingers into the open trunk tray before her. It was the letter that had brought her to this long-forgotten corner. Through the mist over her eyes she re-read the words as through the veil:—

My dear pupil:—Four years ago, you thought the world well lost for love, and flung away success—yours and mine—as a child might a half-eaten apple.