"I know she is a devilish pretty woman. What about her?"
"She is the girl whose father was the twelfth juror in your case."
Annandale, who had been standing, literally dropped with astonishment in a chair. But Sylvia was insatiable. She could not ask enough, she could not get the answers quickly enough in reply. Orr, however, knew very little, odds and ends merely that he gathered in the lobby, summarily that the girl had married Tambourini, the music teacher, and was regarded as destined to be one of the great queens of song.
So interested were all three that the third act was barely noticed. It took the melting beauty of the final duo to distract them from the debutante. But the witchery of that aria would distract a moribund. It was with the bewildering loveliness of it in their ears that they moved out from the box.
"Terra addio!" Orr repeated from it as they descended the stair.
"No, not addio," said Sylvia; "that poor girl may have said farewell to many hopes, but there are other and better ones for her now. I feel that she must have suffered terribly, and because of that suffering we should acquit her of what she did."
"That is the verdict, is it?" said Orr.
"That is my verdict," Sylvia answered. Then touching Annandale's arm she looked up at him and added, "It is yours, too, dear, is it not?"