"We are going to have a great performance to-night," he observed. "Exactly what time does your train go, Richard?"
"Ten o'clock from Charing Cross."
Jocelyn Thew thrust his hand into his pocket, and Richard, rising to his feet, stepped back into the shadows of the box. Something passed between them. Katharine turned her head and clutched nervously at the programme which lay before her. She was looking towards them, and her face was as pale as death. Her host stepped forward at once and smiled pleasantly down at her.
"You will not forget," he whispered, "that we are likely be the centre of observation to-night. I see that our friends Brightman and Crawshay are already amongst the audience."
Katharine picked up her program and affected to examine it. "If only to-night were over!" she murmured.
"It is strange that you should feel like that," he observed, drawing his chair up to the front of the box and leaning towards her in conversational fashion. "Now to me half the evils of life lie in anticipation. When the time of danger actually arrives, those evils seem to take to themselves wings and fly away. Take the case of a great actress on her first night, an emotional and temperamental woman, besieged by fears until the curtain rises, and then carried away by her genius even unto the heights. Our curtain has risen, Miss Beverley. All we can do is to pray that the gods may look our way."
She studied him thoughtfully for a moment. It was obvious that he was not exaggerating. His granite-like face had never seemed more immovable. His tone was perfectly steady, his manner the manner of one looking forward to a pleasant evening. Yet he knew quite well what she, too, guessed—that his enemies were closing in around him, that the box itself was surrounded, that notwithstanding all his ingenuity and all his resource, a crisis had come which seemed insuperable. She was suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the pity of it. All the admiration she had ever felt for his strange insouciance, his almost bravado-like coolness, his mastery over events, seemed suddenly to resolve itself into more definite and more clearly-comprehended emotion. It was the great pity of it all which suddenly appealed to her. She leaned a little forward.
"You have called this our last evening," she whispered. "Tell me one thing, won't you? Tell me why it must be?"
The softness in her eyes was unmistakable, and his own face for a moment relaxed wonderfully. Again there was that gleam almost of tenderness in his deep-blue eyes. Nevertheless, he shook his head.
"Whether I succeed or whether I fail," he said simply, "to-night ends our associations. Don't you understand," he went on, "that if I pass from the shadow of this danger, there is another more imminent, more certain?"