It is unnecessary for us to follow Eve’s emotions through the entire drama, and to narrate the plot, to say how that the gipsies arrive at the castle of Don Fernando where he is celebrating his silver wedding, how his son Eugenio, by an impertinence offered to Preciosa, exasperates the disguised Alonzo into striking him, and is arrested, how Preciosa intercedes, and how it is discovered that she is the daughter of Don Fernando, stolen seventeen years before. The reader may possibly know the drama; if he does not, his loss is not much; it is a drama of little merit and no originality, which would never have lived had not Weber furnished it with a few scraps of incomparably beautiful music.
The curtain fell, the orchestra departed, the boxes were emptying. All those in the stalls around Eve were in movement. She gave a long sigh and woke out of her dream, looked round at Jasper, then at Mr. Coyshe, and smiled; her eyes were dazed, she was not fully awake.
‘Very decent performance,’ said the surgeon, ‘but we shall see something better in London.’
‘Well, Eve,’ said Jasper, ‘are you ready? I will ask for the manager, and then we must be pushing home.’
‘Home!’ repeated Eve, and repeated it questioningly.
‘Yes,’ answered Jasper, ‘have you forgotten the row up the river and the ride before us?’
She put her hand to her head.
‘Oh, Jasper,’ she said, ‘I feel as if I were at home now—here, where I ought always to have been, and was going again into banishment.’