htened, you're all stopping
away. We're coming back to our own!"

There was some such malicious air about the whole theatre. Above, in the
circle, the little empty boxes were dim and shadowy, and one fancied
figures moved there, and then saw that there was no one. Someone up in
the gallery laughed, and the laugh went echoing up and down the empty
spaces. A few people came in and sat nervously about, and no one spoke
except in a low whisper, because voices sounded so loud and impertinent.

Then again the man in the gallery laughed, and every one looked up
frowning. The play began. It was, I think, _Les Idees de Francoise_, but
of that I cannot be sure. It was a farce of the regular French type,
with a bedroom off, and marionettes who continually separated into
couples and giggled together. The giggling to-night was of a sadly
hollow sort. I pitied and admired the actors, spontaneous as a rule, but
now bravely stuffing any kind of sawdust into the figures in their
hands, but the leakage was terrible, and the sawdust lay scattered all
about the stage. The four of us sat as solemn as statues--I don't think
one of us smiled. It was during the second Act that I suddenly laughed.
I don't know that anything very comic was happening on the stage, but I
was aware, with a kind of ironic subconsciousness, that some of the
superior spirits in their superior Heaven must be deriving a great deal
of fun from our situation. There was Vera thinking, I suppose, of
nothing but Lawrence, and Lawrence thinking of nothing but Vera, and
Nina thinking of nothing but Lawrence, and the audience thinking of
their safety, and the players thinking of their salaries, and
Protopopoff at home thinking of his victory, and the Czar in Tsarskoe
thinking of his Godsent autocracy, and Europe thinking of its ideals,
and Germany thinking of its militarism--all self-justified, all
mistaken, and all fulfilling some deeper plan at whose purpose they
could not begin to guess. And how intermingled we all were! Vera and
Nina, M. Robert and Mdlle. Flori on the other side of the footlights,
Trenchard and Marie killed in Galicia, the Kaiser and Hindenburg, the
Archbishop of Canterbury and the postmaster of my village in Glebeshire.

The curtain is coming down, the fat husband is deceived once again, the
lovers are in the bedroom listening behind the door, the comic waiter is
winking at the chamber-maid....

The lights are up and we are alone again in the deserted t