As if fascinated, she followed in terror those flaunting whiskers up the slope of the narrow isle to the back of the auditorium. Thomas Batchgrew seemed to be quite at home in the theatre; he wore no hat and there was a pen behind his ear. Never would she have set foot inside the Imperial de Luxe had she guessed that Thomas Batchgrew was concerned in it. She thought she had heard once, somewhere, that he had to do with cinemas in other parts of the country, but it would not have occurred to her to connect him with a picture-palace so near home. She was not alone in her ignorance of the councillor's share in the Imperial. Practically nobody had heard of it until that night, for Batchgrew had come into the new enterprise by the back door of a loan to its promoters, who were richer in ideas than in capital; and now, the harvest being ripe, he was arranging, by methods not unfamiliar to capitalists, to reap where he had not sown. Shame and fear overcame Rachel. The crystal dream was shivered to dust. Awful apprehension, the expectancy of frightful events, succeeded to it. She perceived that since the very moment of quitting the house the dread of some disaster had been pursuing her; only she had refused to see it--she had found oblivion from it in the new and agitatingly sweet sensations which Louis Fores had procured for her. But now the real was definitely sifted out from the illusory. And nothing but her own daily existence, as she had always lived it, was real. The rest was a snare. There were no forests, no passionate love, no flying steeds, no splendid adorers--for her. She was Rachel Fleckring and none else. Councillor Batchgrew turned to the left, and through a small hole in the painted wall Rachel saw a bright beam shooting out in the shape of a cone--forests, and the unreal denizens of forests shimmering across the entire auditorium to impinge on the screen! And she heard the steady rattle of a revolving machine. Then Batchgrew beckoned her into a very small, queerly shaped room furnished with a table and a chair and a single electric lamp that hung by a cord from a rough hook in the ceiling. A boy stood near the door holding three tin boxes one above another in his arms, and keeping the top one in position with his chin. These boxes were similar to that in which Louis' tickets had been dropped. "Did you want your boxes, sir?" asked the boy. "Put 'em down," Thomas Batchgrew growled. The boy deposited them in haste on the table and hurried out. "How is Mrs. Maldon?" demanded Mr. Batchgrew with curtness, after he had snorted and sniffed. He remained standing near to Rachel. "Oh, she's very much better," said Rachel eagerly. "She was asleep when I left." "Have ye left her by herself?" Mr. Batchgrew continued his inquiry. His voice was as offensive as thick dark glue.