The recollection of his love for Madame Alta came to her, and she felt at the same time a sharp curiosity and a deep disgust--"A man like that must love with madness," she thought, and next, "but how do I know if it were love between them and why should I judge ?" Her clasped hands went to her eyes and she prayed silently: "Keep me apart, O Lord, keep me pure and apart!" For a while she sat with bowed head, then, as her hands fell into her lap, she broke into a little tender laugh at herself.

"What a fool I am, after all," she lamented; "here I have seen a man whom I do not like--once, for an hour--and he has so troubled my quiet that I cannot put my mind upon my work.

What does it matter, and why should a stranger who displeases me have power to compel my thoughts?
It was but a trifle--the distraction of an hour, nothing more--and, whether I like him or not, by to-morrow I shall have forgotten his existence." But she remembered his face as he sat across from her in the dimly lighted stage, and she felt again, with a start, that he was the first man she had ever known.

"Yet he does not attract me, and I shall never see him again," she thought after a moment.

She took up a little religious book from her desk and tried in vain to fix her wandering attention.