Sangster did not look at her, but a little flush rose to his brow.
"Thank you," he said, and his voice sounded, somehow, quite changed.
As the curtain fell on the second act, he rose quietly from his seat and went round to where Jimmy stood.
"Take my place," he said in an undertone. Jimmy looked up. He had not been following the play; he had been thinking—thinking always of the same thing, always of the past few weeks, and the shock of their ending.
He rose to his feet rather reluctantly. Sangster sat down beside Mrs.
Wyatt.
Once or twice he looked across to Christine. She and Jimmy were not talking very much, but there was a little smile on Christine's face, and she looked at Jimmy very often.
Jimmy sat with his chin in the palm of his hand, staring before him with moody eyes. Sangster felt a sort of impatience. What the deuce could the fellow ever have seen in Cynthia Farrow? he asked himself. Was he blind, that he could not penetrate her shallowness, and see the small selfishness of her nature?
A pretty face and laugh, and an undoubted knowledge of men—they were all the assets she possessed; and Sangster knew it. But to Jimmy—Sangster metaphorically shrugged his shoulders as he looked at his friend's moody face.
How could he sit there next to that child and not realise that in his longing he was only grasping at a shadow? What was he made of that he saw more beauty in Cynthia Farrow's blue eyes than in the sweet face of his boyhood's love?
Sangster was glad when the play was over; theatres always bored him. He did not quite know why he had invited himself to Jimmy's box to-night. When they rose to leave he smiled indulgently at Christine's rapt face.