Doris looked round, with the rest, and saw some persons come into a box on the grand tier. Among them was an old gentleman, tall and thin, with a remarkably distinguished presence. He wore a blue ribbon across his waistcoat, but Doris had been attracted more by his face even than by the ribbon.
It was a handsome face, but there was something in it, a certain cold and pitiless hauteur, that seemed to strike a chill almost to Doris’ heart. As he stood in front of the box, and looked around the house with an expression of contempt that was just too indolent to be sheer hatred, she met the hard, merciless eyes and shuddered.
“Who is he, Jeffrey?” she asked, in a whisper, and touching his arm with a hand that trembled a little.
Jeffrey’s rapt face had been fixed on the stage, but he turned and looked at the distinguished personage, and Doris remembered now the sudden pallor of his face, from which his glittering eyes had flashed like two spots of red fire set in white ashes.
The look vanished in a moment and he made no reply, and a few minutes afterward had said:
“It is too hot—let us go.”
Doris recalled the incident now, and wished they had stopped and seen the great actress; especially as Jeffrey had always afterward avoided “Romeo and Juliet,” as if the play had some painful association.
“I shall have to draw on Shakespeare alone for inspiration,” she thought, looking at the brook. “But, ah! if only some one could only teach me to say that ‘Good-night, good-night!’ properly.”
She was repeating the words in a dozen different tones, and shrugging her shoulders discontentedly over each, when suddenly there came another sound upon her ears beside that of her voice and the brook.
It was a dull thud, thud, on the meadow in front of her, and as it came nearer a voice broke out in a kind of accompaniment, a voice singing not unmusically: