OUGLASS now set to work on his second play with teeth clinched. "I will win out in spite of them," he said. "They think I am beaten, but I am just beginning to fight." As the days wore on his self-absorption became more and more marked. All his morning hours were spent at his writing, and when he came to Helen he was cold and listless, and talked of nothing but Enid and her troubles. Even as they rode in the park his mind seemed forever revolving lines and scenes. In the midst of her attempt to amuse him, to divert him, he returned to his theme. He invited her judgments and immediately forgot to listen, so morbidly self-centred was he.

He made no further changes in the book of Lillian's Duty, but put aside Westervelt's request with a wave of his hand. "I leave all that to Miss Merival," he said. "I can't give it any thought now."

From one point of view Helen could not but admire this power of concentration, but when she perceived that her playwright's work had filled his mind to the exclusion of herself she began to suffer. Her pride resented his indifference, and she was saved from anger and disgust only by the beauty of the writing he brought to her.

"The fury of the poet is on him. I must not complain," she thought, and yet a certain regret darkened her face. "All that was so sweet and fine has passed out of our intercourse," she sadly admitted to herself. "I am no longer even the great actress to him. Once he worshipped me—I felt it; now I am a commonplace friend. Is the fault in me? Am I one whom familiarity lessens in value?"

She did not permit herself to think that this was a lasting change, that he had forever passed beyond the lover, and that she would never again fill his world with mystery and light and longing.

And yet this monstrous recession was the truth. In the stress of his work the glamour had utterly died out of Douglass's conception of Helen, just as the lurid light of her old-time advertising had faded from the bill-boards and from the window displays of Broadway. As cold, black, and gray instantaneous photographs had taken the place of the gorgeous, jewel-bedecked, elaborate lithographs of the old plays, so now his thought of her was without warmth.

Helen became aware, too, of an outside change. Her friends used this as a further warning.

"You are becoming commonplace to the public," one said, with a touch of bitterness. "Your admirers no longer wonder. Go back to the glitter and the glory."

"No," she replied. "I will regain my place, and with my own unaided character—and my lines," she added, with a return to her faith in Douglass.

And yet her meetings with him were now a species of torture. Her self-respect suffered with every glance of his eyes. He resembled a man suffering from a fever. At times he talked with tiresome intensity about some new situation, quoting his own characters, beating and hammering at his scenes until Helen closed her eyes for very weariness. Only at wide intervals did he return to some dim realization of his indebtedness to her. One day he gratified her by saying, with a note of tenderness in his voice: "You are keeping the old play on; don't do it. Throw it away; it is a tract—a sermon." Then spoiled it all by bitterly adding, "Go back to your old successes."

"You used to dislike me in such rÔles," she answered, with pain and reproach in face and voice.

"It will only be for a little while," he replied, with a swift return to his enthusiasm. "In two weeks I'll have the new part ready for you." But the sting of his advice remained long in the proud woman's heart.

He went no more to the theatre. "I can't bear to see you playing to empty seats," he declared, in explanation, but in reality he had a horror of the scene of his defeat.

He came to lunch less often, and when they went driving or visiting the galleries all the old-time, joyous companionship was gone. Not infrequently, as they stood before some picture or sat at a concert, he would whisper, "I have it; the act will end with Enid doing so-and-so," and not infrequently he hurried away from her to catch some fugitive illumination which he feared to lose. He came to her reception-room only once of a Saturday afternoon, just before the play closed.

"How is the house?" he asked, with indifference.

"Bad."

"Very bad?"

"Oh yes."

"I must work the harder," he replied, and sank into a sombre silence. He never came inside again.

Helen was deeply wounded by this visit, and was sorely tempted to take him at his word and end the production, but she did not. She could not, so deep had her interest in him become. Loyal to him she must remain, loyal to his work.

As his bank account grew perilously small, Douglass fell into deeps of black despair, wherein all imaginative power left him. At such times the lack of depth and significance in his work appalled him. "It is hopelessly poor and weak; it does not deserve to succeed. I've a mind to tear it in rags." But he resisted this spirit, partly restrained by some hidden power traceable to the influence of Helen and partly by his desire to retrieve himself in the estimation of the world, but mainly because of some hidden force in his own brain, and set to work each time filing and polishing with renewed care of word and phrase.

Slowly the second drama took on form and quality, developing a web of purpose not unlike that involved in a strain of solemn music, and at the last the author's attention was directed towards eliminating minute inharmonies or to the insertion of cacophony with design to make the andante passages the more enthrallingly sweet. As the play neared completion his absorption began to show results. He lost vigor, and Helen's eyes took anxious note of his weariness. "You are growing thin and white, Mr. Author," she said to him, with solicitude in her voice. "You don't look like the rugged Western Scotchman you were when I found you. Am I to be your vampire?"

"On the contrary, I am to destroy you, to judge from the money you are losing on my wretched play. I begin to fear I can never repay you, not even with a great success. I have days when I doubt my power to write a successful drama."

"You work too hard. You must not ruin your health by undue haste. A week or two will not make a killing difference with us. I don't mind playing Lillian another month, if you need the time. It is good discipline, and, besides, I enjoy the part."

"That is because you are good and loyal to a poor writer," he answered, with a break to humble appreciation of her bounty and her bravery. "Be patient with me," he pleaded. "Enid will recoup you for all you have suffered. It will win back all your funds. I have made it as near pure poetry as our harsh, definite life and our elliptical speech will permit." And straightway his mind was filled with dreams of conquering, even while he faced his love, so strangely are courtship and ambition mingled in the heart of man.

At last he began to exult, to boast, to call attention to the beauty of the lines spoken by Enid. "See how her simplicity and virginal charm are enhanced by the rugged, remorseless strength, and by the conscienceless greed of the men surrounding her, and yet she sees in them something admirable. They are like soldiers to her. They are the heroes who tunnel mountains and bridge cataracts. When she looks from her slender, white hands to their gross and powerful bodies she shudders with a sort of fearsome admiration."

"Can all that appear in the lines?"

"Yes. In the lines and in the acting; it must appear in your acting," he added, with a note of admonition.

Her face clouded with pain. "He begins to doubt my ability to delineate his work," she thought, and turned away in order that he might not know how deeply he had wounded her.

---