"My father," said Matilda, "was a very bad man, but I was fond of him. My mother was a good woman, and I never could abide her." "It is all a matter of affection," quoth Panoukian with more than his usual emphasis. "I agree," muttered Old Mole. And all three were surprised at this conclusion. They were uneasily silent for a moment or two, when Panoukian departed. Then Matilda rose and came to her husband and held out her hand. He took it in both his and looked up at her. "Good night," she said. "Good night." "Until to-morrow." And slowly the smile he loved came to her face. Warmed by it and encouraged, he said: "Is anything worrying you?" The smile disappeared. "No. Nothing. I'm beginning to think about things, and you. It's all so queer. . . . Good night." And she was gone. He attended the first night of the new play. Matilda had a larger part, and one very short scene of emotion, or, at least, of what passed for it in the English theater of those days, that is to say it was a nervous and sentimental excitement altogether disproportionate to the action, and not built into the structure of the play, but plastered on to it to conceal an alarming crack in the brickwork. Matilda did very well and only for a moment let the scene slip out of the atmosphere of gimcrackery into the air of life. She did this through defective technique, but that one moment of genuine feeling, even in so false a cause, was so startling as to whip the audience out of its comfortable lethargy into something that was so near pleasure that they could not but applaud. It was an artistic error, since it was her business to be as banal and shallow as the play, which had been made with great mechanical skill so that it required only the superficial service of the actors, and, unlike the candle of the Lord, made no attempt to "search out the inward parts of the belly." In her part Matilda had to discover and betray in one moment her love for the foppish hero of the piece, and being, as aforesaid, wanting in her technical equipment, drew, for the purpose of the scene, on her own imagination, and that which--though she might not know it--had possession of it. The audience was startled into pleasure, Old Mole into something like terror. There was in the woman there on the stage a power, a quality, an essence--he could not find the word--on which he had never counted, for which he had never looked, which now, he most passionately desired to make his own. He knew that it was not artistry in her, his own response to it had too profoundly shaken him; it was living fire, flesh of her flesh, and marvelously made her, for the first time, kin and kind with him. And he knew then that he had been living on theory about her, and was so contemptuous of it and of himself that he brushed aside all thought of the past, all musings and speculations, and was all eagerness to join her, to tell her of the amazing convulsion of himself, and how, at last, through this