for the occasion, and Madame de Chateauvieux, her
gray-blue eyes sparkling with expectation and all her small delicate
features alive with interest and animation, was watching for the rising
of the heavy velvet curtain with an eagerness which brought down upon her
the occasional mockery of her husband, who was in reality, however,
little less excited than herself. It was but three weeks since they had
parted with Isabel Bretherton in Paris, and they were feeling on this
first night something of the anxiety and responsibility which parents
feel when they launch a child upon whom they have expended their best
efforts into a critical world.

As for Eustace, he also had but that afternoon arrived in London. He had
been paying a long duty-visit to some aged relatives in the North, and
had so lengthened it out, in accordance with the whim which had taken
possession of him in Surrey, that he had missed all the preparations for
_Elvira_, and had arrived upon the scene only at the moment when the
final _coup_ was to be delivered. Miss Bretherton had herself sent him a
warm note of invitation, containing an order for the first night and an
appeal to him to come and 'judge me as kindly as truth will let you.' And
he had answered her that, whatever happened, he would be in his place in
the _Calliope_ on the night of the 20th of November.

And now here he was, wearing outwardly precisely the same aspect of
interested expectation as those around him, and all the time conscious
inwardly that to him alone, of all the human beings in that vast theatre,
the experience of the evening would be so vitally and desperately
important, that life on the other side of it would bear the mark of it
for ever. It was a burden to him that his sister suspected nothing of his
state of feeling; it would have consoled him that she should know it, but
it seemed to him impossible to tell her.

'There are the Stuarts,' he said, bending down to her as the orchestra
struck up, 'in the box to the left. Forbes, I suppose, will join them
when it begins. I am told he has been working like a horse for this play.
Every detail in it, they say, is perfect, artistically and historically,
and the time of preparation has been exceptionally short. Why did she
refuse to begin again with the _White Lady_, to give herself more time?'

'I cannot tell you, except that she had a repugnance to it which could
not be got over. I believe her associations with the play were so pai