Rehearsal is like the painted canvas without a frame; it is more
like a plaster cast, most like of all to the sculptor's hollow
moulds. It needs the bronze to bring a statue to life, and it
needs the audience to bring a play to life. Some glamour must
come from one to the other; some wind of enchantment must blow
between them--there must be a magic spell. But these two actors
had produced the spell without the audience.

And yet they were only reading a wistful little love-scene that
Stewart Canby had written the night before.

Two people were falling in love with each other, neither
realizing it. And these two who played the lovers had found some
hidden rhythm that brought them together in one picture as a
chord is one sound. They played to each other and with each
other instinctively; Talbot Potter had forgotten "the smile" and
all the mechanism that went with it. The two held the little
breathless silences of lovers; they broke these silences
timidly, and then their movements and voices ran together like
waters in a fountain. A radiance was about them as it is about
all lovers; they were suffused with it.

To Stewart Canby, watching, they seemed to move within a
sorcerer's circle of enchantment. Upon his disturbed mind there
was dawning a conviction that these inspired mummers were beings
apart from him, knowing things he never could know, feeling
things he never could feel, belonging to another planet whither
he could never voyage, where strange winds blew and all things
lived and grew in a light beyond his understanding. For the
light that shone in the faces of these two was "the light that