ir attention was all for the
stage and they gave no present sign of having any fellow-listeners.
These others had either gone away or were leaving them very much to
themselves. Laura was unable to guess any particular motive on her
sister's part, but the conviction grew within her that she had not put
such an affront on Mr. Wendover simply in order to have a little chat
with Lady Ringrose. There was something else, there was some one else,
in the affair; and when once the girl's idea had become as definite as
that it took but little longer to associate itself with the image of
Captain Crispin. This image made her draw back further behind her
curtain, because it brought the blood to her face; and if she coloured
for shame she coloured also for anger. Captain Crispin was there, in the
opposite box; those horrible women concealed him (she forgot how
harmless and well-read Lady Ringrose had appeared to her that time at
Mellows); they had lent themselves to this abominable proceeding. Selina
was nestling there in safety with him, by their favour, and she had had
the baseness to lay an honest girl, the most loyal, the most unselfish
of sisters, under contribution to the same end. Laura crimsoned with the
sense that she had been, unsuspectingly, part of a scheme, that she was
being used as the two women opposite were used, but that she had been
outraged into the bargain, inasmuch as she was not, like them, a
conscious accomplice and not a person to be given away in that manner
before hundreds of people. It came back to her how bad Selina had been
the day of the business in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and how in spite of
intervening comedies the woman who had then found such words of injury
would be sure to break out in a new spot with a new weapon. Accordingly,
while the pure music filled the place and the rich picture of the stage
glowed beneath it, Laura found herself face to face with the strange
inference that the evil of Selina's nature made her wish--since she had
given herself to it--to bring her sister to her own colour by putting an
appearance of 'fastness' upon her. The girl said to herself that she
would have succeeded, in the cynical view of London; and to her troubled
spirit the immense theatre had a myriad eyes, eyes that she knew, eyes
that would know her, that would see her sitting there with a strange
young man. She had recognised many faces already and her imagination
quickly multiplied them. However, after she had b