Mary Roberts Rinehart

The Amazing Interlude Lib/E Mary Roberts Rinehart

The stage on which we play our little dramas of life and love has for most of us but one setting. It is furnished out with approximately the same things. Characters come, move about, and make their final exits through long-familiar doors. And the backdrop remains approximately the same from beginning to end. Palace or hovel, forest or sea, it is the background for the moving figures of the play.

Sara Lee Kennedy had a backdrop that had every appearance of permanency. The great Scene Painter apparently intended that there should be no change of set for her. Sara Lee herself certainly expected none.

But now and then, amazing things are done on this great stage of ours: lights go down; the backdrop, which had given the illusion of solidity, reveals itself transparent. A sort of fairyland transformation takes place. Beyond the once solid wall, strange figures move on--a new mise-en-scène, with the old blotted out in darkness. The lady, whom we left knitting by the fire, becomes a fairy--Sara Lee became a fairy, of a sort--and meets the prince. Adventure, too; and love, of course. And then the lights go out, and it is the same old backdrop again, and the lady is back by the fire--but with a memory.

This is the story of Sara Lee Kennedy's memory--and of something more. You'll hear all about it.