She heard the curtain rise with a rustling as of mighty wings penetrated by the shrill squeal of an ungreased block; held back a moment; and walked on, into a dazzling glare of footlights, conscious of no emotion whatever beyond desire to get finished with her part and return to the dressing-room. At the designated spot, near the centre of the stage, she paused, faced the audience with her trained smile and mouthed the opening lines with precisely the proper intonation.... The curtain fell at length amid a few, scattering hand-claps that sounded much like faint-hearted firecrackers exploding at a distance. Joan rose from the chair in which she had been seated in a posture simulating abandonment to tears of joy, and walked soberly off the stage--barely anticipating a few stage-hands, who rushed on to make the changes necessary for the next act. Quard was waiting for her. "Well," he said, "it didn't go so bad, did it?" "No," she agreed listlessly. "Anyhow, they didn't throw things at us." "No." She endeavoured to smile, with indifferent success. "I got a lot more laughs with that spittoon business than I thought I would," he continued thoughtfully as they turned back toward the dressing-rooms. Joan made no reply, but when she stopped at the door of her dressing-room, Quard added tentatively: "Anyway, it beats clerking in a department store, doesn't it?" With some hesitation she replied: "I don't know...." XIII Immediately after her second public appearance in "The Convict's Return," Joan removed her make-up, changed to street dress and scurried through the rain to a Child's restaurant, not far from the theatre. In her excitement she had forgotten lunch and she was now thoroughly hungry. But she lingered purposely over the meal and even for some time after she had finished, preoccupied with self-dissection. She was--at last!--an actress; but she was none the less singularly discontented. In a very brief time she had travelled a great way from the Joan Thursby of East Seventy-sixth Street; a world of emotion and experience already dissociated them; but she seemed to have profited little by the journey. She felt sure that she had started the wrong way to prove her ability to act. And foreseeing nothing better than her present circumstances, she questioned gravely an inscrutable future. Instinctively she felt uneasy about this intimate, daily relationship with Quard. She wasn't afraid of him, but she was a little afraid of herself--because she liked him. Though still she dwelt in secret longing upon the image, half real, half fanciful, of a lover gentle and strong and fine--such an one as John Matthias might prove--for all that, Charlie Quard had the power to stir her pulses with a casual look of admiration, or with some careless note of tenderness in his accents.