He had forgotten his cap.  The sales-boy ran after him with it and stuck it on his thick fair hair back to front.

“There—­you’ll be losing your ’ead next!”

It was dusk outside.  The evening performance began at once, and already a thick black stream of people was pouring up the roped gangways and frothing and seething at the box offices.  As they came out of the darkness they had a mystical air of suddenly returned life.  They were pilgrims’ souls surging at the entrance of Paradise.  In a little while they would see her.  Not that they would know what they saw.  They would not be able to understand how great, how brave and splendid she was.  In their blindness of heart they would prefer the ugly little French girl with her shrill voice and absurd caperings; their clapping would be half-hearted, polite, and there would be no passionate, insistent pair of hands to beat up their flagging enthusiasm and bring her back once more into the arena, bowing in regal scorn of them.

For he, Robert, had brought her back twice, just because he wouldn’t stop—­had beaten his hands till even now they were hot and swollen.  She had not known, and he would not have had her know for the whole world.  That was part of the mystery.  You yourself were as nothing.

But it did hurt intolerably to think that perhaps because he was not there she would not be called back so often.  It was as though he betrayed her—­broke his allegiance.  That afternoon, when it had seemed that the evening could never really come, he had told himself that this was the last time; but now, standing on the dim outskirts of the crowd, the photographs that he hadn’t been able to fit into his pockets held fast in his burning hands, he saw how impossible, how even wrong and faithless that decision had been.  So long as a shilling remained to him he had to go, he had to take his place among her loyal people.  It meant being “found out” hopelessly and violently.  They—­the mysterious “they” of authority—­might destroy him utterly.  That would be the most splendid thing of all.  He would have done all that he could do.  He would have laid his last tribute at her unconscious feet and gone out in fire and thunder.

He had actually joined the box-office queue when Rufus Cosgrave found him.  Rufus had been running hard and he was out of breath, and his blue eyes had a queer, strained look, as though they had wanted to cry and had not had the time.  And on his dead-white face the freckles stood out, ludicrously vivid.

“Oh, I say, Robert, where have you been?  I waited and waited for you.  And then I went round to your place—­and Miss Forsyth said she didn’t know and she seemed awfully worried—­and—­and—­oh, I say—­you’re not going again, are you?”

Robert nodded calmly.  But his heart had begun to beat thickly with the premonition of disaster.

“Yes, I am.”

“You might have told me—­oh, I say, do listen—­do come out a minute—­I’m in an awful hole—­there’s going to be an awful row—­I’m—­I’m so beastly scared——­”