No sooner did she find herself alone than her features became transformed; the smile on her lips faded into a grimace, and a threatening scowl appeared on her smooth forehead. She brushed from her eyelashes the tears of angry humiliation which she had held back too long already, and drew a long, deep breath, as if to save her heart from suffocation. Thus she stood, near the threshold, her little hands clinched tight, gazing motionless at the door through which the man who had insulted her had passed out. If a passionate wish possessed the magic power to kill, Jansen would probably have never left her house alive. She heard steps in the adjoining cabinet. She looked up, passed her hands across her eyes and seized a glass of water, which she emptied at a single draught. She was herself again. An elderly woman entered cautiously, dressed simply and entirely in black, but with a care which betrayed long practice in the arts of the toilet. Moreover, her manner of speaking and carrying herself showed, at the first glance, that she had once been at home behind the foot-lights. She was apparently well on in the forties; but her real face was concealed under a coating of paint, very skillfully laid on, and her soft, regular features made no disagreeable impression. "You are still here, my dear?" cried the countess, scarcely attempting to conceal a feeling of displeasure. "I thought you had long ago felt bored at your self-chosen part and gone away." "I have passed an unspeakably pleasurable evening, my dear countess, and wanted to thank you for it. Since I lost my voice and left the stage, I scarcely remember to have heard so much good music in so few hours. Manna in the desert, my dear countess!--manna in the desert! But how lucky it was that I listened to the concert, as I did, in my dark box over there! It is true that he, before whom I particularly wished to avoid appearing, might not have noticed me. Since his new _liaison_ he seems to be blind for everything else, and the many years since we last met have done their best to make it hard for him to recognize me. But imagine, countess, that young painter--the same one who got in my way that night when we discovered the burning picture--strayed by chance into your bedroom! Fortunately, he hastily retired again. But it was a bright moonlight night the first time. Who knows whether he did not recognize me again, especially as the picture in the cabinet there--" "Certainly," nodded the countess, "you are right. Who knows?" She had not heard a word the other had spoken.