Julia Burgdorf, who sat beside her, turning her head, looked at the girl with a half-curious, half-wistful smile in her magnificent eyes; while a man who was leaning on the back of her chair, an architect with a pointed beard and ridiculously small hands and feet, watched Rachel far more than he watched the stage. Simon Hart alone of those near her, seemed unaware of her triumph. Holding his opera glass in his gloved hands, he stared straight ahead of him with his weary, unreadable gaze; and whenever his young wife addressed a word to him, he leaned toward her sidewise without turning his head. On the stage Farrar, as Marguerite, had just appeared at the window of her cottage after her farewell to Faust. Then as the light faded rapidly over the canvas trees, the spinning-wheel, the garden seat,--Faust in doublet and cloak, with a long feather in his cap, approached the casement, and there followed the poetic and sensuous fever of the inimitable duet, in which two voices, a man's and a woman's, sigh together those phrases of adoration, rapture supplication, of surprise, terror, yielding. When finally Marguerite's blond head sank on Faust's shoulder, the breath of their kiss seemed to pass over the entire house. Rachel's hand, incased in its long glove, closed nervously on the edge of the box. She wore a look of troubled amazement; presently she began plucking at the flowers of her bouquet. After the "garden" scene, however, ashamed of her emotion and desiring to escape it, she ceased following closely what went on upon the stage and gave herself up to inspecting the audience. The sight of the jewels on the heads and breasts of some ladies near her, chained her shy glances. She remembered Victor Mudge and the scene before the glowing forge. It was his cunning workmanship and the workmanship of others like him that made such marvels possible. And she rejoiced in the thought that her husband had an intimate knowledge of such treasures and had even written a book about them. A sense of that which is artificial in life was diffused everywhere, and by and by, in that atmosphere of unreality she grew calmer. But when at the conclusion of the performance, she found herself emerging from the crowded auditorium, a part of a variegated stream of jewelled heads, bare shoulders and black coats, she was conscious once more that the irresistible mystery of the music had kindled in her nerves a poetic fever. Suddenly she experienced a fresh impulse of affection for Simon. "I owe all this to him," she thought; and from under the hood of her opera cloak she glanced at his pale profile as he guided her through the richly-dressed crowd.