"He wouldn't sit in a box. If he went at all, it would be in some obscure place where he would not be seen."
"You had better send him a box, a stall and a dress circle, then he can take his choice.... But perhaps you had better not send. His presence among the audience would only make you nervous."
"No, on the contrary, his presence would make me sing."
For whatever reason she had certainly sung and acted with exceptional force and genius, and Margaret was at once lifted out of the obscurity into which it was slipping and took rank with her Elizabeth and her Elsa. As they drove home together in the brougham after the performance, Owen assured her that she had infused a life and meaning into the part, and that henceforth her reading would have to be "adopted."
"I wonder if father was there? He was not in the box. Did you look in the stalls?"
"Yes, but he was not there. You'll go and see him to-morrow."
"No, not to-morrow, dear."
"Why not to-morrow?"
"Because I want him to see the papers. He may not have been in the theatre; on Thursday night is Lady Ascott's ball; then on Friday—I'll go and see father on Friday. I'll try to summon courage. But there is a rehearsal of 'Tannhäuser' on Friday."
And so that she might not be too tired on Friday morning, Owen insisted on her leaving the ball-room at two o'clock, and their last words, as he left her on her doorstep, were that she would go to Dulwich before she went to rehearsal. But in the warmth of her bed, not occupied long enough to restore to the body the strength of which a ball-room had robbed it, her resolution waned, and her brain, weak from insufficient sleep, shrank from the prospect of a long drive and a face of stone at the end of it. She sat moodily sipping her chocolate and brioche.