."

"Excellent sentiment, Mhor--Miss Bathgate will be pleased."

"Yes," said Mhor complacently. "I thought she'd like a pig better than
a Shakespeare one. She said she wondered Jean would go and make a fuss
about the place a play-actor was born in. She says she wouldn't read a
word he wrote, and she didn't seem to like the bits I said to her....
This isn't the first time, Richard Plantagenet, I've sat up for dinner."

"Isn't it?"

"No. I did it at Penrith and Shrewsbury and last night here."

"By Jove, you're a man of the world now, Mhor."

"It mustn't go on," said Jean, "but once in a while...."

"And d'you know where I'm going to-night?" Mhor went on. "To a theatre
to see a play. Yes. And I shan't be in bed till at least eleven o'clock.
It's the first time in my life I've ever been outside after ten o'clock,
and I've always wanted to see what it was like then."

"No different from any other time," Jock told him. But Mhor shook his
head. He knew better. After-ten-o'clock Land _must_ be different....

"This is a great night for us all," Jean said. "Our first play. You have
seen it often, I expect. Are you going?"

"Of course I'm going. I wouldn't miss Jock's face at a play for
anything.... Or yours," he added, leaning towards her. "No, Mhor.
There's no hurry. It doesn't begin for another half-hour ... we'll have
coffee in the other room."

Mhor was in a fever of impatience, and quite ten minutes before the
hour they were in their seats in the front row of the balcony. Oddly
enough, Lord Bidborough's seat happened to be adjoining the seats taken
by the Jardines, and Jean and he sat together.

It was a crowded house, for the play was being played by a new company
for the first time that night. Jean sat silent, much too content to
talk, watching the people round her, and listening idly to snatches of
conversation. Two women, evidently inhabitants of the town, were talking
behind her.

"Yes," one woman was saying; "I said to my sister only to-day, 'What
would we do if there was a sudden alarm in the night?' If we needed a
doctor or a policeman? You know, my dear, the servants are all as old as
we are. I don't really believe there is anyone in our road that can
_run_."

The other laughed comfortably and agreed, but Jean felt chilled a
little, as if a cloud had obscured for a second the sun of her
happiness. In this gloriously young world of unfolding leaves and
budding hawthorns and lambs and singing birds a