After the last curtain call, Leone touched her husband's arm. She felt violently ill-yet she smiled, trying to keep panic from her eyes.

"I want to say a few words to Marianne," she said with effort "Let's go to her dressing room."

She saw him start to protest.

"Leone, you look ill! I'm going to take you home!"

"Marianne is my dearest friend," Leone reminded him, and she started to follow the others who were less interested in missing streetcars and busses than in catching one glimpse of a woman who received at least a thousand dollars a performance for her singing.

But there were so many people ahead of them and behind. Pushing, shoving people in whom no human love was visible. Elbows that dug into the tender parts of your body-cheap perfumes that mingled unfavorably with their owner's heavy perspiration. Leone tried to move along with them. She must reach Marianne!

"I don't care who she is!" Paul grumbled, "let's get out of here."

They were the last words Leone heard him say before she screamedunable to suppress this pain any longer, and all the people were swallowed up by the blackness.

When Leone saw people around her again they weren't the same nor were there half so many of them.

"You have a little girl!" the nurse said hesitantly, as if she wondered whether an apology were necessary.

Leone smiled. It had to be a girl. For her, it had to be a girl! She went back to sleep, content.

When she opened her eyes again there was Paul standing by her pillow and saying over and over.

"Are you all right, Leone?"

"It isn't a son," she said-feeling a little sorry for him. "I want to name her Marianne!"

"You have another visitor today," the small red haired nurse announced importantly, adjusting her bi-focals.

And then Leone looked beyond Paul-beyond everyone else in the room. She saw what she had wanted to see-the "vision of Marguerite"-the quick smile of Marianne, and she felt as Faust had felt, that even if the devil demanded her soul, she must tell Marianne "I love you!" and that she was no longer afraid or ashamed of her love.

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