"I wish she'd keep back!" thought McTaggart. He could picture in the next box Cydonia's golden head at just the same angle and in between the narrow velvet curtains barely separating the pair.
In the dim light he groped for and found his own chair, lifted it with bated breath and placed it down again behind that of his guest, who turned at his movement with a faint frown of displeasure over her broken dreams.
"What are you doing there, Pierrot?" The whisper was sharp.
"I thought," McTaggart explained mendaciously, "this way I could hear without seeing too much. That fat soprano is murdering romance!"
"Quel enfant!" Fantine smiled. For the singer in question with her capacious bosom, now clasped fervently in the fat tenor's arms, appealed suddenly to her dormant sense of humor.
"Rather a ... magnificent figure for a maiden..." McTaggart followed up his remark. Some one below them breathed an indignant "Sh! ..." and Fantine held up an admonitory finger.
McTaggart leaned back, conscious again of the heat. "Stifling in here—wish I hadn't come!" His thoughts ran on, seeking a plan to get his guest away before the final rush.
He was determined the pair should not meet. Oddly enough sub-consciously he blamed Cydonia—with that hateful parent—exonerating himself in the matter.
His flirtation with the girl had lapsed a little of late, owing to the serious illness of Mrs. Cadell. A chill followed up by a tiring sale of work in a draughty hall had resulted in pneumonia. The dance had been postponed and Cydonia herself, bereft of her chaperone, had rarely made an appearance among the few friends she shared with McTaggart.
Stolen meetings had been few and far between. The anxiety caused by her mother's condition had roused the slumbering conscience in the girl, and McTaggart's love for her had suffered from the test. It needed propinquity to keep the fires alight.