"Ah here he comes back!" cried Biddy, behind her fan, while the absentee edged into his seat in time for the fifth act. He stood there a moment, first looking round the theatre; then he turned his eyes to the box occupied by his relatives, smiling and waving his hand.
"After that he'll surely come and see you," said Miss Tressilian.
"We shall see him as we go out," Biddy returned: "he must lose no more time."
Nick looked at him with a glass, then exclaiming: "Well, I'm glad he has pulled himself together!"
"Why what's the matter with him—if he wasn't disappointed of his seat?" Miss Tressilian demanded.
"The matter with him is that a couple of hours ago he had a great shock."
"A great shock?"
"I may as well mention it at last," Nick went on. "I had to say something to him in the lobby there when we met—something I was pretty sure he couldn't like. I let him have it full in the face—it seemed to me better and wiser. I let him know that Juliet's married."
"Didn't he know it?" asked Biddy, who, with her face raised, had listened in deep stillness to every word that fell from her brother.
"How should he have known it? It has only just taken place, and they've been so clever, for reasons of their own—those people move among a lot of considerations that are absolutely foreign to us—about keeping it out of the papers. They put in a lot of lies and they leave out the real things."