Ah, it was gone for ever, nothing would ever recall it--that one quick moment of living contact! In a deeper sense than met the ear, she was on the stage and he among the audience.

To the end his gray life would play the part of spectator to hers, or else she would soon have passed beyond his grasp and touch, just as Elvira would have vanished in a little while from the sight of the great audience which now hung upon her every movement.
Then from the consciousness of his own private smart he was swept out, whether he would or no, into the general current of feeling which was stirring the multitude of human beings around him, and he found himself gradually mastered by considerations of a different order altogether.

Was this the actress he had watched with such incessant critical revolt six months before?
Was this the half-educated girl, grasping at results utterly beyond her realisation, whom he remembered?
It seemed to him impossible that this quick artistic intelligence, this nervous understanding of the demands made upon her, this faculty in meeting them, could have been developed by the same Isabel Bretherton whose earlier image was so distinctly graven on his memory.

And yet his trained eye learned after a while to decipher in a hundred indications the past history of the change.

He saw how she had worked, and where; the influences which had been brought to bear upon her were all familiar to him; they had been part of his own training, and they belonged, as he knew, to the first school of dramatic art in Europe--to the school which keeps alive from generation to generation the excellence and fame of the best French drama.