That version, called “Valerie,” was completed within four weeks, and it was produced at Wallack’s Theatre on February 15, 1886. Wallack, instead of buying the refashioned play outright from Belasco, as was the usual custom of the time, agreed to pay him the handsome royalty of $250 a week, as long as it held his stage,--the adapter, moreover, being privileged to present it outside of New York. “Valerie,” while serviceable in a theatrical way, is not a thoroughly good play, and it is distinctly inferior to the earlier version, by Hart Jackson,--as, indeed, could scarcely be otherwise, since Belasco had worked under the disadvantage of being required to make a new play on the basis of an old one, then still current, in which the best possible use of the material implicated had already been made. In the building of “Valerie,” which is comprised in three acts, reliance was placed in whatever of freshness could be imparted to the method of treatment,--and that was not much. The scene of the action was shifted from France to England. The foreground of the life of _Fernande_, appearing under the name of _Valerie_, was omitted. The names of the other characters were also changed. The First Act deals largely with preparation and is devoted mainly to a somewhat preposterous scene in which the evil agent of the drama, _Helena_, allures her lover, _Sir Everard Challoner_, by a false confession that she is tired of him, to make a true confession not only that he is tired of her but that he loves another woman. _Challoner_ is represented as of a noble English family and of a singularly ingenuous mind. He states that the woman whom he loves is a young stranger whom he has casually encountered, leaning against a post, in the street, in a condition of faintness, and the deceptive _Helena_ thereupon proffers her services to discover the unknown object of his sudden affection. She has rescued a vagrant female from the streets, and it turns out that this waif is the interesting stranger for whom they are to seek. In the Second Act the malignant _Helena_ exults in the marriage of her former lover to a woman whom she believes to be a demirep. That is to consummate her revenge for having been discarded by _Challoner_, but when she is about to overwhelm him with the declaration that he has wedded an outcast, _Walter_, the good genius of the story, forcibly compels her sudden retirement behind a velvet curtain. This is the “strong situation” of the drama. In the Third Act this evil woman’s scheme of vengeance, which she endeavors to push to a completion, is finally discomfited by the vindication of the girl, _Valerie_, and a happy climax crowns an incredible fiction.