o anybody an
injustice, was beginning to suspect that it was written in blank
verse.

The acting did nothing to dispel the growing uneasiness. Sir Chester
himself, apparently oppressed by the weightiness of the occasion and
the responsibility of offering an unfamiliar brand of goods to his
public, had dropped his customary debonair method of delivering lines
and was mouthing his speeches. It was good gargling, but bad
elocution. And, for some reason best known to himself, he had
entrusted the role of the heroine to a doll-like damsel with a lisp,
of whom the audience disapproved sternly from her initial entrance.

It was about half-way through the first act that Jill, whose attention
had begun to wander, heard a soft groan at her side. The seats which
Freddie Rooke had bought were at the extreme end of the seventh row.
There was only one other seat in the row, and, as Derek had placed his
mother on his left and was sitting between her and Jill, the latter
had this seat on her right. It had been empty at the rise of the
curtain, but in the past few minutes a man had slipped silently into
it. The darkness prevented Jill from seeing his face, but it was plain
that he was suffering, and her sympathy went out to him. His opinion
of the play so obviously coincided with her own.

Presently the first act ended, and the lights went up. There was a
spatter of insincere applause from the stalls, echoed in the
dress-circle. It grew fainter in the upper circle, and did not reach
the gallery at all.

"Well?" said Jill to Derek. "What do you think of it?"

"Too awful for words," said Derek sternly.

He leaned forward to join the conversation which had started between
Lady Underhill and some friends she had discovered in the seats in
front; and Jill, turning, became aware that the man on her right was
looking at her intently. He was a big man with rough, wiry hair and a
humorous mouth. His age appeared to be somewhere in the middle
twenties. Jill, in the brief moment in which their eyes met, decided
that he was ugly, but with an ugliness that was rather attractive. He
reminded her of one of those large, loose, shaggy dogs that break
things in drawing-rooms but make admirable companions for the open
road. She had a feeling that he would look better in tweeds in a field
than in evening dress in a theatre. He had nice eyes. She could not
distinguish their colour, but they were frank and friendly.

All this Jill noted with her cus