CHAPTER XI
McTaggart drew his chair forward from behind the curtain of the box and gazed out on the crowded Hippodrome.
Not a seat was vacant. For to-night a famous composer was conducting his masterpiece with a picked company brought over for a fleeting visit to England.
As he watched, the lights were lowered in the body of the hall and the beautiful overture began, stealing like a spirit of sun-lit shores across the artificially warm atmosphere. The curtain rolled up to disclose a narrowed stage and the cheap, garish scenery that seems a necessary adjunct to the opera in Italy.
McTaggart's eyes took it in with a careless glance, and returned to the other occupant of the box.
To-night Fantine seemed to acquire a new personality. An air faintly tragic and dignified hung over the pale face, and even her dress enhanced the suggestion, with that subtle link that lies between a Parisian and her clothes.
She wore a long cloak of velvet brocade: dull wine-coloured flowers on an oyster ground, relieved by a border of silver fox and the faint gleam of metallic threads running through the material.
Beneath this, one caught a glimpse of a demi-toilette of black and white: that veiled décolletage dear to the foreigner, suggesting without revealing each line of the neck and arms which the Englishwoman seems more ready to expose. Her hair, waved, glossy and black, was perfectly dressed without ornament, and among the crowd of women there, each with nodding Paradise plumes or a jewelled fillet, the delusive simplicity struck a restful, distinctive note, throwing into strong relief the haunting charm of her pale face.
McTaggart's eyes rested on her, with a quiet sense of pleasure. Where other women of her class would have welcomed the occasion to outvie in "smartness" the "respectable rich," Fantine seemed to have drawn back with unconscious pride relying on some hidden power to set her apart.