The great door at the end of the palace had slowly opened, and gliding through it with drooping head and hands clasped before her came Elvira, followed by her little maid Beatriz.

The storm which greeted her appearance was such as thrilled the pulses of the oldest _habitue_ in the theatre.

Tears came to Madame de Chateauvieux's eyes, and she looked up at her brother.
'What a scene! It is overpowering--it is too much for her! I wish they would let her go on!' Kendal made no answer, his soul was in his eyes; he had no senses for any but one person.

_She_ was there, within a few yards of him, in all the sovereignty of her beauty and her fame, invested with the utmost romance that circumstances could bestow, and about, if half he heard were true, to reap a great artistic, no less than a great personal triumph.

Had he felt towards her only as the public felt it would have been an experience beyond the common run, and as it was--oh, this aching, intolerable sense of desire, of separation, of irremediable need! Was that her voice?
He had heard that tone of despair in it before--under over-arching woods, when the June warmth was in the air! That white outstretched hand had once lain close clasped in his own; those eyes had once looked with a passionate trouble into his.