The woman looked at him as if she wondered what had suddenly taken him. Then she asked in an injured tone: “Why shouldn’t I have told you if you’d ’ad callers, sir?” “I thought you might have thought I was asleep.” “Indeed you were, sir, when I came in with the lamp—and well you’d earned it, Mr. Wayworth!” The landlady came back an hour later to bring him a telegram; it was just as he had begun to dress to dine at his club and go down to the theatre. “See me to-night in front, and don’t come near me till it’s over.” It was in these words that Violet communicated her wishes for the evening. He obeyed them to the letter; he watched her from the depths of a box. He was in no position to say how she might have struck him the night before, but what he saw during these charmed hours filled him with admiration and gratitude. She _was_ in it, this time; she had pulled herself together, she had taken possession, she was felicitous at every turn. Fresh from his revelation of Nona he was in a position to judge, and as he judged he exulted. He was thrilled and carried away, and he was moreover intensely curious to know what had happened to her, by what unfathomable art she had managed in a few hours to effect such a change of base. It was as if _she_ had had a revelation of Nona, so convincing a clearness had been breathed upon the picture. He kept himself quiet in the _entr’actes_—he would speak to her only at the end; but before the play was half over the manager burst into his box. “It’s prodigious, what she’s up to!” cried Mr. Loder, almost more bewildered than gratified. “She has gone in for a new reading—a blessed somersault in the air!” “Is it quite different?” Wayworth asked, sharing his mystification. “Different? Hyperion to a satyr! It’s devilish good, my boy!” “It’s devilish good,” said Wayworth, “and it’s in a different key altogether from the key of her rehearsal.” “I’ll run you six months!” the manager declared; and he rushed round again to the actress, leaving Wayworth with a sense that she had already pulled him through. She had with the audience an immense personal success.