It was Wednesday night. Madame Dolores stood bowing before the eager, admiring throng that greeted her farewell appearance. Some of her romantic story had been noised abroad. It was rumored that the morrow would behold her a bride, and there were not a few who envied the fortunate bride-groom. Walter Earle and his sister occupied a private box as usual. He looked pale and thin still, but very handsome and happy, and his blue eyes dwelt adoringly on the brilliant beauty of his promised bride. Violet, sitting beside him in rich and costly attire, had never looked more lovely. "How perfectly beautiful Lina looks to-night," she whispered to her brother. "To look at her now, she does not seem like the Lina Meredith of five years ago. Do you remember how tanned and bashful and shabby she was then? To-night she is the most beautiful woman I ever saw, and her jewels are worth a fortune. I never saw such magnificent diamonds." Then the curtain rose and the glorious voice of Madame Dolores filled the vast theater with entrancing melody. They turned their attention to the stage again. It seemed to the _prima donna's_ admirers that she sang and acted more splendidly than ever that night. They looked and listened in rapt, spell-bound admiration, dreading for the moment to arrive when that heavy curtain should fall between her and the public forever. There was one scene, perhaps the most interesting and thrilling of the whole opera, where the heroine knelt weeping and praying at the feet of a cruel and relentless husband. Madame Dolores was always grand in this scene. The whole audience leaned forward now, breathless and eager, as the curtain rose upon this favorite part of the opera. The scene was laid in a dim, Moorish garden in the shadow of a ruined temple, bathed in the mystic beams of moonlight. Before the broken archway a tall, dark, haughty man stood with folded arms looking down at the suppliant kneeling on the ground, her loose, white robe dishevelled, her dark hair broken from its fillets of gold, and flowing in careless tresses around her, half hiding her slender form in its luxuriant veil. At a little distance stood a lovely little siren who had lured the fickle man from his rightful love and duty. His eyes were fixed on her, not on his sorrowful, pleading wife. At that moment, when the attention of the whole vast throng was concentrated in intense silence upon the scene, there suddenly broke through the back of the stage a vast and terrible sheet of flame that lighted the whole scene with a crimson, deadly glare. A tumultuous shriek of horror and despair rose from the throng, and the actors rushed wildly forward toward the footlights in a frenzied effort at escape. The _prima donna's_ foot became entangled in her flowing robe, she swayed and fell forward across the footlights that instantly licked the soft folds of her dress into a winding sheet of flame. CHAPTER XXXVII.