said Claude. "I found I had brought it with me, so
I laid it down there. If Madre had come with us she might have occupied
that seat. I thought I would let her wish lie there with Alston's
roses."

Their eyes met in the shadow of the box. On coming into it Claude had
turned out the electric burner.

"It's strange to think of Madre in Berkeley Square to-night," said
Charmian slowly. "I wonder what she is doing."

"I am quite sure she is alone, up in her reading-room thinking of us, in
one of her white dresses."

"And wishing us--" she paused.

The first notes of the Prelude sounded in the hidden orchestra.

Claude fixed his mind on the thought of Madre, in a white dress, sitting
alone in the well-known quiet room, thinking of him--in that moment he
was an egoist--wishing him the best. He could almost see Madre's face
rise up before him, as it must have looked when she wrote that
cablegram, a face kind, intense, with fire, sorrow, and love in the
burning eyes. And the thought of that face helped him very much just
then, more than he would have thought it possible that anything could
help him, was a firm and a tender friend to him in a difficult crisis of
his life.

He sat back in the shadow behind Charmian in a sort of strange
loneliness, conscious of the enormous crowd around him. He could not see
the members of this crowd. He saw only Charmian in her pale green gown,
with a touch of green in her cloud of dark hair, and a long way off the
stage. He heard perpetually his own music. But to-night it did not seem
to him to be his own. He listened to it with a kind of dreadful and
supreme detachment, as if it had nothing to do with him. But he listened
with great intensity, with all his critical intelligence at work, and
with--so at least it seemed to him--his heart prepared to be touched,
moved. It was not a hard heart which was beating that night in the
breast of Claude, nor was it the foolish, emotional heart of the
partisan, lost to the touch of reason, to the influence of the deepest
truth which a man of any genius dare not deny. No critic in the vast
theater that night listened to Claude's opera more dispassionately than
did Claude himself. Sometimes he thought of the colored woman in the
huge pink hat. He knew she was somewhere in the theater, probably far up
in that dim gallery toward which he had looked at rehearsal, when the
building had presented itself to his imagination as a monster waiting
heavily to be