His eyes turned to them again and again. There was something very familiar in the face of the elder woman—something—— Challoner knit his brows. Who the dickens——
The lights went down here, and he forgot all about them as the curtains rolled slowly up on Cynthia's first act.
Challoner almost knew the play by heart, but he followed it all eagerly, word by word, as if he had never seen it before, till the big velvet curtains fell together again, and a storm of applause broke the silence.
Challoner rose hastily. He had just opened the door of the box to go to Cynthia when an attendant entered. He carried a note on a tray.
"For you, sir."
Challoner took it wonderingly. It was written in pencil on a page torn from a pocket-book.
"A lady in the stalls gave it to me, sir," the attendant explained, vaguely apologetic.
Jimmy unfolded the little slip of paper, and read the faintly pencilled words. "Won't you come and speak to us, or have you quite forgotten the old days at Upton House?"
Challoner's face flashed into eager delight. What an idiot he had been not to recognise them. How could he have ever forgotten them? Of course, the girl in the white frock was Christine, whose mother had given his boyhood all it had ever known of home life!
Of course, he had not seen them for years, but—dash it all! what an ungrateful brute they must think him!