are a number of problems under the laws of dramatic construction which
we must solve before the play can now be made to reach the hearts of an
audience as it did before. Let us see what they are.

The love of Lilian for Harold Routledge cannot now be the one grand
passion of her life. It must be the love of a young girl, however
sincere and intense, which yields, afterward, to the stronger and deeper
love of a woman for her husband. The next great change, therefore, which
the laws of dramatic construction forced upon us was this: Lilian must
now control her own passion, and when she meets her lover in the second
act she must not depend for her moral safety on the awakening of a
mother's love by the appearance of her child. Her love for Harold is no
longer such an all-controlling force as will justify a woman--justify
her dramatically, I mean--yielding to it. For her to depend on an
outside influence would be to show a weakness of character that would
make her uninteresting. Instead, therefore, of receiving her former
lover with dangerous pent-up fires, Lilian now feels pity for him. She
hardly yet knows her own feelings toward her husband; but his manhood
and kindness are gradually forcing their way to her heart. Routledge, in
his own passion, forgets himself, and she now repels him. She even
threatens to strike the bell, when the Count de Carojac appears, and
warns his rival to desist. This is now the end of the second act, a very
different end, you see, from the other version, where the little girl
runs in, and, in her innocence, saves the mother from herself.

Here let me tell a curious experience, which illustrates how stubbornly
persistent the dramatic laws are, in having their own way. We were all
three of us--manager, literary attaché, and author--so pleased with the
original ending of the second act the picture of the little girl in her
mother's arms, and the lover bowing his head in its presence of