But now it was Elise who began to plan. "When your play is produced, we'll run away somewhere. Do you remember the place you always talked about--up in the hills?" He looked at her through his round glasses. "I can't get away from this"--he waved his hand toward the stage. "If it's a success you can, Jimmie." "It will be a success. Ursula Simms is a wonder. Look at her, Elise. Look at her!" Duncan and I could look at nothing else. As many times as I had seen her in the part, I came to it always eagerly. It was her great scene--where the girl, breaking free from all that has bound her, takes the hand of her vagabond lover and goes forth, leaving behind wealth and a marriage of distinction, that she may wander across the moors and down on the sands, with the wild wind in her face, the stars for a canopy! It tugged at our hearts. It would tug, we knew, at the heart of any audience. It was the human nature in us all which responded. Not one of us but would have broken bonds. Oh, youth, youth! Is there anything like it in the whole wide world? I do not think that it tugged at the heart of Elise. Her heart was not like that. It was a stay-at-home heart. A workaday-world heart. Elise would never under any circumstance have gone forth with a vagabond on a wild night. But here was Ursula doing it every day. On the evening of the first dress-rehearsal she wore clothes that showed her sense of fitness. As if in casting off conventional restraints, she renounced conventional attire; she came down to her lover wrapped in a cloak of the deep-purple bloom of the heather of the moor, and there was a pheasant's feather in her cap. "_May you never regret it, my dear, my dear_," said the lover on the stage. "_I shall love you for a million years_," said Ursula, and we felt that she would, and that love was eternal, and that any woman might have it if she would put her hand in her lover's and run away with him on a wild night! And it was the genius of Jimmie Harding that made us feel that the thing could be done. He sat forward in his chair, his arms on the back of the seat in front of him. "Jove!" he kept saying under his breath. "It's the real thing. It's the real thing--" When the scene was over, he went on the stage and stood by Ursula. Elise from her seat watched them. Ursula had taken off the cap with the pheasant's feather. Her glorious hair shone like copper, her hand was on her hip, her little swagger matched the swagger that we remembered in the old Jimmie. I wondered if Elise remembered. * * * * * I am not sure what made Ursula care for Jimmie Harding. He was no longer a figure for romance. But she did care. It was, perhaps, that she saw in him the fundamental things which belonged to both of them, and which did not belong to Elise. As the days went on I was sorry for Elise. I should never have believed that I could be sorry, but I was. Jimmie was always punctiliously polite to her. But he was only that.