Through the second act the lady in gold listened breathlessly, as if life itself were suspended. It seemed to her that the soul left her body, and went floating up, up, on the strains of the music. She was praying, praying with all her strength, for the success of this work, that the people might feel just as she felt how it was beautiful! When a crash of applause came and a call for the composer, it seemed but an answer to her prayer. She rose to her feet, radiant. Prospero C---- came to the foot-lights below, looking a slight thing, the acclaimed great man, in his close black evening dress, and bowed his thanks. Then, as the applause continued, he lingered a moment, and let his eye pass along the friendly faces in the boxes, a grateful emotion expressed in his smile. The lady in gold leaned over the velvet parapet, breathing short, tremulously smiling, her flowers in her hands. His eye passed her unrecognizing. She wanted to shout: "It is I, Paula! Nothing could keep me away!" The clamor subsided. Panting, she leaned back in the shade. The third act ended in triumph. Again the composer was called. Paula laughed and cried at the same time, clapping her little hands like mad, forgetting herself. Then, when it was all over and she sat in the dark carriage rolling homeward, she felt a chill seizing upon her very heart; she began to shiver. But her physical condition scarcely interested her; a sense of the sad things of life weighed heavily upon her: the vanity of earthly hopes, the evanescence of happy things, the inequality in the measure of pain and pleasure to God's children, the fugitiveness of illusions, the foolishness of dreams. She thought of the beggar sitting at the corner in sun and rain through years: she felt disgust for a world where such things could be. She said, "It is a good thing to have done with it. It is a deliverance. I will not give it one regret; no, not one." She felt suddenly that she did not love Italy: it had betrayed her. "It is you, you who are to blame," she said, full of helpless resentment, shaking a pale small hand vaguely from the window out at the balmy moonlit world; "you, soft air! you, flower smell! you, velvety firmament with the many-colored stars! I was a simple soul: my common life was enough for me; you sowed in my unguarded heart all the seeds of vain dreams, and fostered them. And they bear no fruit; they wither on their shallow roots--they are weeds!--But I will not curse you, for God made you lovely." She closed her eyes; her thoughts turned to remote Schattenort; she wished she were there again, in the dull, quiet, big, cold, familiar country house where she had been born and bred. A mist of bitter longing rose in her eyes. The moon was shining clamorously, obtrusively; it cast a green light, a light almost warm, on the pale pavement. She hated its fervent beauty. "Would God I were home!" she sighed. Veronika, mistaking her meaning, said, "You are almost there."