the flowers. It's gone. Never
mind. Claude must have taken it."

The conviction came to her that Claude had taken it with him, as a man
takes a friend he can trust when he is going into a "tight place."

"Sit here!" she whispered to Susan.

Susan sat softly down beside Charmian at the back of the box, took one
of her hands and held it, not closely, but gently. They did not speak
again till the third act was finished.

It was the longest act of the opera, and the most elaborate. Charmian
had always secretly been afraid of it since the first full rehearsal.
She could never get out of her mind the torture she had endured that
evening when everything had gone wrong, when she had said to herself in
a sort of fierce and active despair: "This is my idea of Hell." She felt
that even if the opera were a triumphant success, even if the third act
were acclaimed, she would always dread it, almost as a woman may dread
an enemy. Once it had tortured her, and she had a feminine memory for a
thing that had caused her agony.

Now she sat with her hand in Susan's, face to face with the dangerous
act, and anticipating the end, when at last Claude would confront the
world he had avoided so carefully till she came into his life.

The act, which had been chaotic at rehearsal, was going with perfect
smoothness, almost too smoothly Charmian began to think. It glided on
its way almost with a certain blandness. In Algeria, Crayford had
devoted most of his attention to this act, which he had said "wanted a
lot of doing to." He had "made" the whole of it "over." Charmian
remembered now very well the long discussions which had taken place at
Djenan-el-Maqui about this act. One discussion stood out from the rest
at this moment. She almost felt the heat brooding over the far-off land.
She almost saw the sky shrouded in filmy gray, the white edge of the sea
breaking sullenly against the long line of shore, the beads of sweat on
the forehead of Claude, his clenched hands, the expression in his eyes
when he said, after her answered challenge to Crayford, "Tell me what
you want, all you want, and I'll try to do it."

This act to which this vast audience, in which she was now definitely
included against her will, was listening was the product of that scene,
that discussion, that resignation of Claude's.

Charmian's hand twitched under Susan's, but she did not draw it away,
though Susan--as she knew--would have made no effort to retain it. She
wa