It was Anthony who could not stand it. Anthony had come in on his way to his dressing-room. As he looked at Nicky his handsome, hawk-like face was drawn with a dreadful, yearning, ineffectual pity. Frances had discovered that her husband could both be and look pathetic. He had wanted her to be sorry for him and she was sorry for him, because his male pity was all agony; there was no ecstasy in it of any sort at all. Nicky was far more her flesh and blood than he was Anthony's.
Nicky stirred in his mother's lap. He raised his head. And when he saw that queer look on his father's face he smiled at it. He had to make the smile himself, for it refused to come of its own accord. He made it carefully, so that it shouldn't hurt him. But he made it so well that it hurt Frances and Anthony.
"I never saw a child bear pain as Nicky does," Frances said in her pride.
"If he can bear it, I can't," said Anthony. And he stalked into his dressing-room and shut the door on himself.
"Daddy minds more than you do," said Frances.
At that Nicky sat up. His eyes glittered and his cheeks burned with the fever of his earache.
"I don't mind," he said. "Really and truly I don't mind. I don't care if my ear does ache.
"It's my eyes is crying, not me."
At nine o'clock, when they were all sitting down to dinner, Nicky sent for his father and mother. Something had happened.