AN absence of ventilation made the room an oven and discouraged sleep. Through the width of skylight, in inert recumbence, she could follow wonderingly the frail pristine tints of dawn. Flushed, rose-barred, it spread above her with fantastic drifting clouds masking the morning stars. From a neighbouring church a clock struck five. Miss Sinquier sighed; she had not closed her eyes the whole night through. “One needs a blind,” she mused, “and a pane——.” She looked about her for something to throw. _Cinquecento_, Italian things—a chest, a crucifix, a huge guitar, a grim, carved catafalque all purple sticks and violet legs (Juliet’s) crowded the floor. “A mess of glass ... and cut my feet ...;” she murmured, gathering about her a _négligé_ of oxydized knitted stuff and sauntering out towards the footlights in quest of air. Notwithstanding the thermometer, she could hear Miss May Mant breathing nasally from behind her door. The stage was almost dark. “Verona,” set in autumn trees, looked fast asleep. Here and there a campanile shot up, in high relief, backed by a scenic hill, or an umbrella-pine. On a column in the “Market Place” crouched a brazen lion. An acrobatic impulse took her at the sight of it. “_Sono pazza per te_ Si! _Sono pazza, pazza, pazza ... Pazza per amore_,” she warbled, leaping lightly over the footlights into the stalls. The auditorium, steeped in darkness, felt extinguished, chill. Making a circuit of the boxes, she found her way up a stairway into the promenade. Busts of players, busts of poets, busts of peris, interspersed by tall mirrors in gilt-bordered mouldings, smiled on her good-day. Sinking to a low, sprucely-cushioned seat, she breathed a sigh of content. Rid of the perpetual frictions of the inevitable _personnel_, she could possess the theatre, for a little while, in quietude to herself. In the long window boxes, tufts of white daisies inclining to the air brought back to mind a certain meadow, known as _Basings_, a pet haunt with her at home. At the pond end, in a small coppice, doves cried “Coucoussou-coucoussou” all the day long. Here, soon a year ago, while weaving herself a garland (she was playing at being Europa with the Saunders’ Fifeshire bull; flourishing flowers at it; tempting it with waving poppies; defying it to bear her away from the surrounding stagnance), the realization of her dramatic gift first discovered itself.