“Those pearls!” Stonehouse heard a man behind him say loudly.  “Prince Frederick gave them to her.  And then he shot himself.  They belonged to the family.  He had no right, of course, but she wanted them.”

He could feel Cosgrave stir impatiently.

It went on, as it seemed to him, for an incredible length of time.  It was like a prairie fire that spread and blazed up, higher and brighter.  And there was no escape.  He had a queer conviction that his was the only static spirit in the whole theatre, that secretly, in their hearts, the audience had flung themselves into the riot with her, the oldest and staidest of them, as perhaps they had often wanted to do when they heard a jolly tune like that.  It was artless, graceless.  One only needed to let oneself go.

  “I’m Gyp Labelle,
  Come dance with me.”

The jaded disgust and weariness were gone.  Something had come into the theatre that had not been there before.  Nothing mattered either so much or so little.  The main business was to have a good time somehow—­not to worry or care.

She had whirled catherine-wheel fashion, head over heels from end to end of the stage.  The long-haired youth swept the hair from his hot, blue-jowled face in time to catch her, and they stood side by side, she with her thin arms stretched up straight in a gesture of triumph, her lips still parted in that curiously empty, expectant smile.

Then it was over.  Once the curtain rose to perfunctory applause.  People settled back in their seats, or prepared to go.  It was as though the fire had been withdrawn from a molten metal which began instantly to harden.  A woman next to Stonehouse tittered.

“So vulgar and silly—­I don’t know what people see in her.”

“I want to get away,” Cosgrave said sharply.  “It’s this beastly closeness.”

He looked and walked as though he had been drinking.

Although the show was not over, the majority of the audience had begun to stream out.  Two men who loitered in the gangway in front of Stonehouse exchanged laconic comments.

“A live wire, eh, what?”

For some reason or other Stonehouse saw clearly and remembered afterwards the face of the man who answered.  It was bloated and full of a weary, humorous intelligence.

“Life itself, my dear fellow, life itself!”

5

Cosgrave scarcely answered his companion’s comments.  He withdrew suddenly into himself, and after that he shirked the subject, understandably enough, for if he had had illusions on her account they must have been effectively shattered.  But also he ceased to lie all day on his bed and stare up at the mosquito-infested river of his nightmare.  He grew restless and shy, as though he were engaged with secret business of his own of which Stonehouse knew nothing, and of which he could say nothing.  Yet Stonehouse had caught his eyes fixed on him with the doubtful, rather wistful earnestness of a child trying to make up its mind to confide. (There was still something pathetically young about Rufus Cosgrave.  Now that his body was growing stronger, youth peered out of his wan face like a famished prisoner demanding liberty.)