with him in
company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a
little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while
the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again
and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick
asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word
to say I can't come."

"To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick.

"Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which
came back to him afterwards.

When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in
their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall
became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any
performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside
Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion
of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the
curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could
see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile
lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the
plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and
fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow
brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own
comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had
already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to
escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a
farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to
meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up
to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going
round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times,
dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom,
in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece
with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and
at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once
in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was
helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been
particularly explicit.

On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who
seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room