A lovely pallor was out over Zoe, enlarging the dark pools of her eyes. "Sit out in the house, center aisle, and look at me, dears--so I can feel you there--" To the magic of a bit of cardboard Lilly and Bruce were in the vast fantastic hinterland of the Opera House, and, stumbling through various degrees of blackness, were presently down in the colossal maw of the auditorium, finding out seats in the great pit of darkness. They sat in silence, except that for Lilly the beating of her heart seemed to record like a clapper against her brain. "Don't be nervous," he said once. "I'm not," she lied. There was a bunch light on the stage, a dirty backdrop of Corinthian pillars and esplanade and no wings, one or two stage hands moving about, and finally a concert grand piano dragged down. Suddenly Lilly recognized Auchinloss. He was standing just outside the pool of light that flowed over the piano, the unforgetable outline of his shaggy head, joined by two little peninsulas of sideburns to the heavy spade of beard, gray now and not the sooty black she remembered. The odor of that little room up on Amsterdam Avenue came winding back. Millie du Gass, the supreme soprano of two continents--dead now, of heartbreak, some said; Alma, in her plaid-silk waist and the bookkeeper's curve to her back. That walk across the parlor floor-- "There's Auchinloss now," said Bruce. She did not reply, but sat with her handkerchief against her mouth and crowded breathing. There were three auditions. A high-bosomed young woman with a powerful mezzo soprano that pulled her mouth to a rhomboid sang Santuzza's famous aria from "Cavalleria Rusticana," stopping suddenly to some unseen signal. "Fine, strong voice of resonant tin," said Visigoth, under his breath. A throaty young tenor sang "Ride, Ride, Pagliacci," through to the sob, anticipating it with a violent throw of body. Then Trieste took the piano, running downward an avalanche of quick chords, the sepia-outlined head of Auchinloss gone meanwhile from the stage and down somewhere in the sea of dimness that rolled through the auditorium. Lilly could see his profile etched into the twilight. Very suddenly Zoe was downstage, and through the cymbals hitting into Lilly's consciousness the voice finally came through to her, flowing so easily on the beautiful, the tried old theme of Michaela's aria that she had the feeling of great bolts of every color ribbon, winding about and not even half un-flung as they struck the topmost places. How true her flight! With each fluty mount how like a bird, the line of her throat, as her chin went up, throbbing slightly of its warbling, and from where she stood her gaze seeming to plumb them out. She sang through without interruption, so that when she had finished, the timbre lay like a singing wire on the silence.