The stage door-keeper was now warned to find out what he could, if another anonymous gift appeared. Also, Céline was sent early to the theatre. Marise could not, however, quite bring herself to engage a detective. She was tempted to do so, and urged by her mother, who had visions of a mysterious millionaire ready to take the place of Severance if the Englishman failed after all. But the girl felt that to set sleuth-hounds on its track would kill romance. It would, she told Mums, be like deliberately rubbing the bloom off hothouse grapes before you ate them. And as it turned out, she was glad she had listened to sentiment; for on the third night her only offerings were chocolates and flowers ticketed conspicuously with their givers' names.
This was like a too abrupt ending to a fairy tale. But, after all, it was only the end of a chapter. On the fourth night a long blue-and-silver box lay across two chairs in the dressing-room. It looked like a box from a smart dressmaker, though no dressmaker's name was visible. "Has Mademoiselle ordered anything?" Céline inquired, as she untied the ribbon-fastenings.
No, Mademoiselle had ordered nothing that day--at least nothing for the theatre. She gave a little gasp as the Frenchwoman removed the box cover and a layer of silver-stencilled blue tissue paper. Underneath filmed a pale blue cloud which Marise snatched up and pronounced to be a "boudoir gown." It was made from a material which fashion names mousseline de soie one year and something else another. It was the blue of bluebells, banded with swansdown and embroidered with silver thistles. Altogether, it might have been created expressly for Miss Sorel by an admiring genius.
But Marise knew better, and would pit her own "instinct" against her mother's any day. "No, from Him," she pronounced. "If this goes on much longer without my finding out who He is, I shall simply perish."
And it did go on: not night after night, but stopping, and beginning again just as she thought the giver's invention exhausted or his pockets empty. It went on for ten days, until Marise had received, in addition to the three first gifts, an ancient Italian mirror in a carved silver frame; an exquisite wax doll, modelled and dressed to represent herself as "Dolores" in the third act of "The Spring Song," and an old Sèvres box filled with crystallised violets--evidently _his_ favoured flower.