It seemed to him impossible that this quick artistic intelligence, this nervous understanding of the demands made upon her, this faculty in meeting them, could have been developed by the same Isabel Bretherton whose earlier image was so distinctly graven on his memory. And yet his trained eye learned after a while to decipher in a hundred indications the past history of the change. He saw how she had worked, and where; the influences which had been brought to bear upon her were all familiar to him; they had been part of his own training, and they belonged, as he knew, to the first school of dramatic art in Europe--to the school which keeps alive from generation to generation the excellence and fame of the best French drama. He came to estimate by degrees all that she had done; he saw also all she had still to do. In the spring she had been an actress without a future, condemned by the inexorable logic of things to see her fame desert her with the first withering of her beauty. Now she had, as it were, but started towards her rightful goal, but her feet were in the great high-road, and Kendal saw before her, if she had but strength to reach it, the very highest summit of artistic success. The end of the first act was reached; Elvira, returning from the performance of the marriage ceremony in the chapel of the palace, had emerged hand-in-hand with her husband, and, followed by her wedding train, upon the great hall. She had caught sight of Macias standing blanched and tottering under the weight of the incredible news which had just been given to him by the Duke. She had flung away the hateful hand which held her, and, with a cry, instinct with the sharp and terrible despair of youth, she had thrown herself at the feet of her lover. When the curtain fell, Edward Wallace could have had few doubts--if he had ever cherished any--of the success of his play. He himself escaped behind the scenes as soon as Miss Bretherton's last recall was over, and the box was filled in his absence with a stream of friends, and a constant murmur of congratulation, which was music in the ears of Madame de Châteauvieux, and, for the moment, silenced in Kendal his own throbbing and desolate consciousness.