with eerie fancies; and always behind her laughter was something which
got into her eyes, giving them a haunting melancholy. She had no signs
of hysteria, though now and then there came heart-breaking little
outbursts of emotion which had this proof that they were not hysteria--
they were never seen by others. They were sacred to her own solitude.
While in Montreal she had tasted for the first time the joys of the
theatre, and had then secretly read numbers of plays, which she bought
from an old bookseller, who was wise enough to choose them for her. She
became possessed of a love for the stage even before Gerard Fynes came
upon the scene. The beginning of it all was the rumour that her mother
was now an actress; yet the root-cause was far down in a temperament
responsive to all artistic things.

The coming of the Man from Outside acted on the confined elements of her
nature like the shutter of a camera. It let in a world of light upon
unexplored places, it set free elements of being which had not before
been active. She had been instantly drawn to Gerard Fynes. He had the
distance from her own life which provoked interest, and in that distance
was the mother whom perhaps it was her duty to forget, yet for whom she
had a longing which grew greater as the years went on.

Gerard Fynes could talk well, and his vivid pictures of his short play-
acting career absorbed her; and all the time she was vigilant for some
name, for the description of some actress which would seem to be a clue
to the lost spirit of her life. This clue never came, but before she
gave up hope of it, the man had got nearer to her than any man had ever
done.

After meeting him she awoke to the fact that there was a difference
between men, that it was not the same thing to be young as to be old;