her last appearance on the stage.

The play had been "Much Ado."

Never had she acted with finer humor, or greater gaiety. Yet all the
evening she had felt a strange sadness.

When it was all over, and friends had trooped round to the stage to
praise her, and trooped away, laughing and happy, she felt a strange,
sad, unused reluctance to see them go.

Then she sat down to her dressing table, hurriedly removed her
make-up, and allowed herself to be stripped of her stage finery. Her
fine spirits seemed to strip off with her character. She shivered
occasionally with nervousness, or superstition, and she was strangely
silent.

All day she had, for some inexplicable reason, been thinking of her
girlhood, of what her life might have been if, at a critical moment,
she had chosen a woman's ordinary lot instead of work,--or if, at a
later day, she had yielded to, instead of resisted, a great
temptation. All day, as on many days lately, she had wondered if she
regretted it, or if, the days of her great triumph having passed,--as
pass they must,--she should regret it later if she did not yet.

It was probably because,--early in the season as it was--she was
tired, and the October night oppressed her with the heat of Indian
Summer.

Silently she had allowed herself to be undressed, and redressed in