Nobody seemed to know very much about her; several nice-looking young girls and exceedingly respectable young men sent her flowers. Afterward they gathered at the stage entrance, evidently expecting to meet and congratulate her; but she had slipped away. And while they hunted high and low, and the last figurante had trotted off under the lamp-lights, Dolly lay in her own dark room, face among the pillows, sobbing her heart out for a dead man who had been kind to her for nothing.
And, at the same hour, across an ocean, another woman awoke to take up the ravelled threadings of her life again and, through another day, remember Louis Malcourt and all that he had left undone for kindness' sake.
There were others, too, who were not likely to forget him, particularly those who had received, with some astonishment, a legacy apiece of one small Chinese gilded idol—images all of the Pa-hsien or of Kwan-Yin, who rescues souls from hell with the mystic lotus-prayer, "Om mane padme hum."
But the true Catholicism, which perplexed the eighteen legatees lay in the paradox of the Mohammedan inscriptions across each lotus written in Malcourt's hand:
"I direct my face unto Him who hath created.
"Who maketh His messengers with two and three and four pairs of wings.
"And thou shall see them going in procession.
"This is what ye are promised: 'For the last hour will surely come; there is no doubt thereof; but the greater part of men believe it not.'
"Thus, facing the stars, I go out among them into darkness.