Yet, the miner was still glowing with the thrill of his new life. "I'm young!" he repeated to himself as he was shown to his seat. And he felt young. He felt that he had never yet lived and that he was now about to live; and he thanked Heaven that he had kept himself trained for the experience.
He had dined slowly, as befits a man that has earned his leisure, and his conversation with Holt had not been hurried. Consequently, when he reached his place, the first act of Madama Butterfly was already well over. With the voice of Apollo and the figure of an elephant, the tenor, bursting through the uniform of a naval officer with a corpulence that would endanger a battleship, was engaged in that vocal assault upon a fortress of heavy orchestration which is the penance of all that have to sing the rôle of "Pinkerton." Stainton listened and tried to enjoy. He listened until the curtain fell at length upon the beginning of the inevitable tragedy, until the lights flashed up about him, and he found himself looking straight into the eyes of a young girl in a lower box not thirty feet away.
About him swept the broad curve of boxes that has been called "The Diamond Horseshoe," filled with wonderful toilettes and beautiful women, but Stainton did not see these. In the particular box toward which he was looking there were three other people: there was a matronly woman in what appeared to be brocade; there was a sleek, weary-eyed, elderly man, and there was another man faintly suggested in the background, as the lover of the mistress is faintly suggested in Da Vinci's masterpiece—but Stainton was no more conscious of this trio than he was of the gowns and women of the broad horseshoe. He saw, or was conscious of seeing, only that girl.
And she was leaning far over the rail, at pause where, when their eyes met, his intense gaze had arrested her: a young girl, scarcely eighteen years old, her delicate, oval face full of the joy of life, aglow with the excitement, the novelty of place, people, music. The light was upon her—upon her slim, softly white-clad body trembling at the unguessed portal of womanhood just as it trembled also under his gaze. She had wonderful hair, which waved without artifice, as blue-black as a thunder-cloud in May; she had level brows and eyes large and dark and tender. Her lips were damp, the lower one now timidly indrawn. While he looked at her, there awoke in Stainton the Neolithic man, the savage and poet that sang what he felt and was unashamed to feel and sing: she was like a Spring evening in the woods: warm and dusky and clothed in the light of stars.
Stainton did not move, yet his heart seemed twisting in his breast. Was he mad? Was he alive, sane, awake and in New York of to-day? If so, if he were himself, then were the old stories true, and did the dead walk? Sitting there, stonily, there floated through his brain a line from a well-conceived and ill-executed poem:
"At Paris it was, at the opera there ..."
The girl was the one to break the spell. When Stainton would have ceased looking, he could never know. But the girl flushed yet more deeply and turned away, with a quick movement that was almost a reprimand but not enough of a reprimand to be an acknowledgment that she was aware of him.
Jim, his own cheeks burning at the realisation of his insolence, but his heart tumultuous for that other reason, himself started. He shifted clumsily in his chair and so became conscious of another movement in the box.
A man—the man that had been, at Stainton's first glimpse of the party, dimly outlined—was disentangling himself from the background, was bending forward to make vehement signs in Stainton's direction, was finally, and with no end of effort on Stainton's part, assuming recognisable shape. It was George Holt.
Holt waved his hand again and nodded toward the lobby. Then, as Stainton nodded a tardy comprehension, he faded once more into the background of the box.