closed at the end of the week, and everybody concerned knew that the
prophecy would come true. No official notice was issued, no person
who repeated the tale could give a reliable authority for it;
nevertheless, for some mysterious reason it convinced. The rival
Promenade had already passed away. The high invisible powers who ruled
the world of pleasure were moving at the behest of powers still higher
than themselves; and the cloak-room attendants, in their frivolous
tiny aprons, shared murmuringly behind plush portières in the woe of
the ladies with large hats.

The revue being a failure, the auditorium was more than half empty. In
the Promenade to each man there were at least five pretty ladies, and
the ladies looked gloomily across many rows of vacant seats at the
bright proscenium where jocularities of an exacerbating tedium were
being enacted. Not that the jocularities were inane beyond the usual,
but failure made them seem so. None had the slightest idea why the
revue had failed; for precisely similar revues, concocted according to
the same recipe and full of the same jocularities executed by the same
players at the same salaries, had crowded the theatre for many months
together. It was an incomprehensible universe.

Christine suddenly shrugged her shoulders and walked out. What use in
staying to the end?

It was long after ten o'clock, and an exquisite faint light lingering
in the sky still revealed the features of the people in the streets.
The man who had devoted half a life to the ingenious project of
lengthening the summer days by altering clocks was in his disappointed
grave; but victory had come to him there, for statesmen had at last
proved the possibility of that which they had always maintained to be