The old people stood in the narrow aisle staring at the apotheosis of this brilliant creature in whose existence they had collaborated. They had the mythological experience of two old peasants seeing their child translated as in a chariot of fire. Their eyes were dazzled with tears, for they had mourned her as lost, either dead in body or dead of soul. They had imagined her drowned and floating down the Bay, or floating along the sidewalks of New York. They had feared for her the much-advertised fate of the white slaves--she might be bound out to Singapore or destined for Alaskan dance-halls. There are so many fates for parents to dread for their lost children. To have their Kedzie float home to them on pinions of radiant beauty was an almost intolerable beatitude. Kedzie's mother started down the aisle, crying, “Kedzie, my baby! My little lost baby!” before Adna could check her. Kedzie did not answer her mother, but went on with her work as if she were deaf. She came streaming from the projection-machine in long beams of light. This vivid, smiling, weeping, dancing, sobbing Kedzie was only a vibration rebounding from a screen. Perhaps that is all any of us are. One thing was certain: the Thropps determined to redeem their lost lamb as soon as they could get to New York. Their lost lamb was gamboling in blessed pastures. The Nimrim people spoke to the parents with reverence, as if their son had been elected President--which would not have been, after all, so wonderful as their daughter's being a screen queen. There is no end to the astonishments of our every-day life. While the Thropps had been watching their daughter disport before them in a little dark room in Missouri, and other people in numbers of other cities were seeing her in duplicate, she herself was in none of the places, but in her own room--with Jim Dyckman paying court to her. Kedzie was engaged in reeling off a new life of her own for the astonishment of the angels, or whatever audience it is for whose amusement the eternal movie show of mankind is performed. Kedzie's story was progressing with cinematographic speed and with transitions almost as abrupt as the typical five-reeler. Kedzie was an anxious spectator as well as an actor in her own life film. She did not see how she could get out of the tangled situation her whims, her necessities, and her fates had constructed about her. She had been more or less forced into a betrothal with the wealthy Jim Dyckman before she had dissolved her marriage with Tommie Gilfoyle. She could not find Gilfoyle, and she grew frenzied with the dread that her inability to find him might thwart all her dreams.