'But aren't you going to act, Di--? I can't say it.' 'I don't call it acting. I come on in the first act. I just do that to save the salary, for you know I have an interest in the tour.' Kate had no idea as to what was meant by having 'an interest in the tour,' and she did not ask, fearing to waste her present happiness in questions. Her attention was so concentrated on the big man by her side that she scarcely knew she was in a theatre, and had as yet perceived neither the star-light nor the drop-curtain. Dick spoke to her of herself and of himself, but he said nothing that recalled any of the realities of her life, and when he suddenly lifted his hand from hers and whispered, 'Here comes Miss Hender: we mustn't appear too intimate before her,' she experienced the sensation of one awaking out of a most delicious dream. Hender cast a last retort at the two men with whom she was chaffing, and, descending through the chairs, said: 'Mr. Lennox, you're wanted behind.' Dick promised to see them again when the act was over, and hastened away, and Hender, settling herself in her chair, looked at Kate in a way which said as distinctly as words, 'Well, my young woman, you do go it when you're out on the loose.' But she refrained from putting her thoughts into words, possibly because she feared to turn her mistress from what she considered, too obviously, indeed, to be the right path. They were sitting in the middle division of a gallery divided into three parts, where the twilight was broken by the yellow-painted backs of the chairs, and where a series of mirrors, framed in black wood, decorated the walls, reflecting monotonously different small corners of the house. Only a dozen or fifteen people had as yet come in, and they moved about like melancholy shades; or, when sitting still, seemed like ink-spots on a dark background. The two women looked down into the great pit, through which the crowd was rolling in one direction, a sort of human tide, a vague tumult in which little was distinguishable; a bald head or a bunch of yellow flowers in a woman's bonnet flashed through the darkness for an instant like the crest of a wave. A dozen pale jets of a miserable iron gas-fitting hanging out of the shadows of the roof struggled in the gloom, leaving the outlines of the Muses above the proscenium as undefinable as the silhouettes of the shopkeepers in the pit. Over against the shopkeepers was the drop-curtain, the centre of which contained a romantic picture intended to prepare the spectators for the play soon to begin. Kate admired the lake, and during the long interval it seemed to her bluer and more beautiful than any she had ever seen. Along the shores there were boats with sailors hoisting sails, and she began to wonder what was the destination of these boats, if the sailors were leaving their sweethearts or setting forth to regain them.