er, and Jonson Ramer. Susan Fleet was next
door with friends, a highly cultivated elderly man, famous as a lawyer
and connoisseur, and his wife. Alston Lake's family and most of his many
friends were in the stalls, where Armand Gillier had a seat close to a
gangway, so that he could easily slip out to pay his homage to Enid
Mardon. His head was soaked with eau-de-quinine. On his muscular hands
he wore thick white kid gloves. And he gazed at his name on the
programme with almost greedy eyes.

Mrs. Shiffney glanced swiftly about the immense house, looking from box
to box. She took up her opera glasses.

"I wonder where the Heaths are sitting," she said. "Henriette, can you
see them?"

Madame Sennier looked round with her hard yellow eyes.

"No. Perhaps they aren't here yet. Or they may be above us. Or perhaps
they are too nervous to come."

Her painted lips stretched themselves in a faint and enigmatic smile.

"I'm quite sure Charmian Heath will be here. This is to be the great
night of her life. She is not the woman to miss it."

Mrs. Shiffney leaned round to the next box.

"Susan, can you see the Heaths?"

"Yes," returned the theosophist, in her calm chest voice. "She is just
coming into a box on the same tier as we are in."

"Where? Where?"

"Over there, on my right, about ten boxes from us. She is in pale
green."

"That pretty woman!" said the elderly lawyer. "Is she the composer's
wife?"

He put up his glasses.

"Yes, I see now," said Mrs. Shiffney.

She drew back into her box.

"There she is, Henriette! She seems to be alone. But Heath is sitting
behind her in the shadow. I saw him for a minute before he sat down."

Madame Sennier looked at Charmian as Charmian had once looked at her
across another opera house. But her mind contemplated Charmian in this
hour of her destiny implacably. She said nothing.

Jacques Sennier began to chatter.

At a few minutes past eight the lights went down and the opera began.

Charmian and Claude were alone in their box. On the empty seat beside
hers Charmian had laid some red roses sent to her by Alston Lake before
she had started. Five minutes after the arrival of the flowers had come
a cablegram from England addressed to Claude: "I wish you both the best
to-night love. Madre."

Just before the opera began, as Charmian glanced down at her roses, she
saw a paper lying beside them on the silk-covered chair.

"What's that?" she said.

"Madre's cablegram,"