Page:Possession (1926).pdf/358

 her Ellen, her little girl whom she had once held upon her knee, who now sat, as it were, upon a throne before a world which listened breathlessly? All those people who filled the seats about her and above her might have risen and left, but to Hattie the evening would have been a great success, a triumph in which the judgment of the world had been wrong. They did not leave; instead they sat, leaning forward a bit or slipped down in their seats with closed eyes, bedazzled as much by the perfection and grace of this new musician as by the music itself.

Rebecca, standing in the darkness at the back of the great hall, understood all that. She knew that in part the triumph was her own, for had she not tricked them, hypnotized them? They would not be able to forget. She, like Hattie, felt with every fiber of her body, the very sensations of all those people who listened—people from great houses of the rich who had heard of Lilli Barr from friends in Europe, people from the suburbs who would rush away in frantic haste for the last train home, people—young people—like the one who sat next to Hattie, in shabby clothes and worn shoes, who were fighting now desperately, as Ellen had once fought, to reach that same platform, that same brilliant shower of light. They listened, enchanted by the sound, caught by the spell of one woman's genius and another's brilliant trickery. Possessed they were, for the moment.

And presently the tears began to stream down Hattie's face. They dropped to the hands worn and red, concealed now by the expensive gloves which cramped her uncomfortably.

The applause rose and fell in great waves, sweeping over her with the roaring of a great surf heard far away, and through it the voice of Miss Ogilvie, saying gently, "Who would have believed it?"

And then at length, when the sound of the last number had died away, an overwhelming surf which would not die even when the woman in crimson appeared again and again under the brilliant shower of light; until at last Lilli Barr seated herself before the