As the first act proceeded, she recovered herself a little. There was less of a dense black veil before her eyes, less surging in her ears. She could hardly have told what the first dialogue between the second heroine and the first heroine--a certain Lady Chumleigh--was. The girl was sister to the heroine's husband, Sir Dyved Chumleigh, and appeared to cause discomfiture to her sister-in-law by some innocent teasing; at least, that was what Joan gathered from the lady's subsequent soliloquy.
"However, it doesn't much matter whether I understand the thing or not," she told herself. "It seems vapid and unreal in the extreme."
The thought had hardly flashed across her mind when a sensational episode in the play awakened the attention of the house. A slouching tramp, ragged, dirty, abandoned-looking, suddenly appeared from behind a tree, and addressed Lady Chumleigh as "My wife!"
Joan sat up and stared. Was it an awful nightmare? No! As the interview proceeded between the aristocratic lady and the miserable ex-criminal, the husband she had hoped was dead, and with him her past degradation and misery, Joan recognized that the stage play was not only real, and no bad dream, but the parallel of her own miserable story. The unfortunate heroine had met and loved and been courted by Sir Dyved Chumleigh while trying to live down her secret past. And just when she seemed sure of present and future happiness, the wretch who had stolen her affection traded on it, and then having been imprisoned for fraud, perjury, and what not, had appeared in the flesh to blast her whole life.
The curtain descended upon a passionate scene. The unhappy woman, after a spurt of useless defiance, fell on her knees to adjure, bribe, appeal to the man's baser nature, since he seemed to be in possession of no better feeling. He listened grimly. The outcome of the encounter was left to the next act.
"Dearest, it is upsetting you, I am afraid," said Vansittart, as the turned-up lights showed him Joan pale and gasping. "But don't think that villain will have it all his own way. I read a resumé of the plot, and she kills him before the curtain falls on the last act."
"What?" said Joan, gazing at him--very strangely, he thought. He was about to propose they should leave the theatre, when there was a knock at the box door, and Mr. Hunt came in.
"Well, how do you like it?" he asked pleasantly, accepting Vansittart's chair.
CHAPTER XXXI
When Vansittart had spoken those awful words, in a light, almost reassuring manner, "she kills him before the curtain falls on the last act," Joan first felt as if her whole mental and physical being were convulsed with a strange, almost unearthly, pain; then everything surged around her, and threatened to sink away into blackness, blankness.