I had become lost in this appealing melodrama, and though my mood was broken in the next act, in the third act, in the celebrated garden scene, it was revived and intensified. The sugary sweetness of the music had an almost hypnotic effect upon me, for I had never heard it till now, and the ecstatic sensuality of the duet rapt me into a world of love, where everything else was forgotten. It was all utterly new to me; it thrilled me; it drowned me in erotic dreams that swept me onward like the waves of the sea; and through all, subconsciously, as I listened and watched, I was carrying on another love-making of my own, with which Faust and Margaret had nothing to do. Through the next two acts I followed more closely the fortunes of the unhappy heroine, not without a naïve wonder why so much tragedy, so much remorse, should attend on what appeared to me――but for the intervention of the devil――a quite natural and straightforward courtship. For some reason, possibly the fault of the libretto, more probably because I could only catch about half the words, I could not discover wherein lay the secret of the trouble, nor why the lovers did not get married. I accepted the situation however: I accepted, I think, everything but the absurd “Soldiers’ Chorus,” and the death-scene of Valentine. This latter nearly made me sick at the time, though I forgot all about it when the curtain rose to reveal the wretched Margaret in prison. With enthusiasm I watched her reject her lover and the demon, and fling herself on her knees to pour out her soul in a prayer which finished on the high B. At last I saw her released from all the ills of life, her body stretched on the miserable straw bed. And with that the walls of the prison rolled back, and I had a vision of her soul being borne to heaven by angels. It is true those white-clad, flaxen-haired creatures, with glistening wings and golden crowns, bore a not remote resemblance to several of the livelier persons I had seen mingling with the soldiers and students at an earlier stage of the drama; nevertheless I beheld them, in this pause on their way to heaven, with respect, if not exactly veneration. “I doubt they’re as near it now as they’ll ever be,” said George, cynically, pulling his cap from his jacket pocket.