"Pardon me!" said she. "I had forgotten how painful to you is any reference to that matter. We will speak only of your present renown, and of the current of mutual sympathy that attracts each of us toward the other. For myself, that attraction began on the fourteenth of last July. You had just arrived at Paris, and a morning journal, in mentioning the troops, and the names of the generals who appeared at the review, related, apropos of your military exploits, many exciting details of your escape during the war. Do you recall the applause that greeted you when you marched past the tribunes? I saw you then for the first time, but I should have known you among a thousand! The next day--" "The next day," Henri interrupted, "it was my turn to applaud you. I had been deprived a long time of the pleasures of the theatre, of which I am very fond, and I began by going to the Comedie Francaise, where you played, that night, the role of Helene in 'Mademoiselle de la Seigliere.' Do you remember?" "Do I remember! I recognized you instantly, sitting in the third row in the orchestra." "I had never seen you until then," Henri continued, "but that sympathetic current was soon established, from the moment you appeared until the end of the second piece. As it is my opinion that any officer is sufficiently a gentleman to have the right to love a girl of noble birth, I fell readily under the spell in which she whom you represented echoed my own sentiments. Bernard Stamply also had just returned from captivity, and the more enamored of you he became the more I pleased myself with fancying my own personality an incarnation of his, with less presumption than would be necessary for me to imagine myself the hero of which you spoke a moment ago. After the play, a friend brought me here, presented me to you--" "And the sympathetic current did the rest!" added Eugenie Gontier, looking at him tenderly. "Since then you have consecrated to me a part of whatever time is at your disposal, and I assure you that I never have been so happy, nor have felt so flattered, in my life." "Second act!" came the voice of the call-boy from the corridor. "Will you return here after the fourth act?" said the actress, rising. "I shall wish to know how you find me in the great scene, and whether there is another princess de Bouillon among the audience--beware of her!" "You know very well that there is not." "Not yet, perhaps, but military men are so inconstant! By and by, Maurice!" she murmured, with a smile. "By and by, Adrienne!" Henri replied, kissing her hand. He accompanied her to the steps that led to the stage, and, lounging along the passage that ends at the head of the grand stairway, he entered the theatre and hastened to his usual seat in the third row of the orchestra. CHAPTER XII RIVAL BEAUTIES