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“They sure are crazy about you. I wondered often how you were getting on.”

“You didn’t guess that somebody was making a new woman of me, did you?”

His gaze, as it traveled from her dark-rimmed eyes shadowed by the drooping hat, to the long white hands and slim black-swathed body, held the same look of awe it had worn the night he had seen her make up.

“Lordy, girl!” he gasped. “How you must have worked to accomplish it!”

“Work!” came in a breath. “I worked like a galley slave—never stopping, except for sleep. Even while I ate I studied—Russian and French, and gesture and movement. I even learned to eat herring. And all the time he was teaching me to act. In four years—almost—I’ve seen no one, talked to no one but him. I’ve had to obliterate self completely. He has in reality created Lisa Parsinova.”

“He had to have the material to do it. The stuff was there.”

“But he is a genius, Lou. He knows his public just as a magician knows his bag of tricks.”

The traffic at Thirty-fourth Street halted them. They spoke in whispers, and every now and then her eyes ssss1 rested with a look of caution on the inexpressive back of her chauffeur.