Please, please, Cybele, don’t take it seriously!... If you look that way—if you are unhappy, I—I——”
A gentle snore from the poet transfixed the firing-line, but the snore woke up the poet and he mechanically pinched an atom out of the atmosphere, blinking at the stage.
“Precious—very, very precious,” he murmured drowsily. “Thank you—thank everybody—” And he sank into an obese and noiseless slumber as the gray and silver curtain slowly fell. The applause, far from rousing him, merely soothed him; a honeyed smile hovered on his lips which formed the words “Thank you.” That was all; the firing-line stirred, breathed deeply, and folded twelve soft white hands. Chlorippe, twelve, and Philodice, thirteen, yawned, pink-mouthed, sleepy-eyed; Dione, fourteen, laid her golden head on the shoulder of Aphrodite, fifteen.
The finger-tips of Lissa and Harrow still touched, scarcely clinging; they had turned toward one another when the curtain fell. But the play, to them, had been a pantomime of silhouettes, the stage, a void edged with flame—the scene, the audience, the theater, the poet himself as unreal and meaningless as the shadowy
attitudes of the shapes that vanished when the phantom curtain closed its folds.
And through the subdued light, turning noiselessly, they peered at one another, conscious that naught else was real in the misty, golden-tinted gloom; that they were alone together there in a formless, soundless chaos peopled by shapes impalpable as dreams.
“Now tell me,” she said, her lips scarcely moving as the soft voice stirred them like carmine petals stirring in a scented breeze.
“Tell you that it is—love?”
“Yes, tell me.”
“That I love you, Lissa?”