And withal she was most horribly nervous, just as nervous as though it was she who was doomed to face the indifferent and exacting audience with nothing but a violin bow for weapon.  She was so nervous that she could not listen, could not even follow Miss Ingate’s simple remarks; she heard them as from a long distance, and grasped them after a long interval.  Still, she was uplifted, doughty, and proud.  The humiliation of the afternoon had vanished like a mist.  Nay, she felt glad that Musa had behaved to her just as he did behave.  His mien pleased her; his wounding words, each of which she clearly remembered, were a source of delight.  She had never admired him so much.  She had now no resentment against him.  He had proved that her hopes of him were, after all, well justified.  He would succeed.  Only some silly and improbable accident could stop him from succeeding.  She was not nervous about his success.  She was nervous for him.  She became him.  She tuned his fiddle, gathered herself together and walked on to the platform, bowed to the dim multitudinous heads in front of him, looked at the conductor, waited for the opening bars, drew his bow across his strings at precisely the correct second, and heard the resulting sound under her ear.  And all that before the conductor had appeared!  Such were the manifestations of her purely personal desire for the achievement of a neat, clean job.

“See!” said Miss Ingate.  “Mr. Gilman is bowing to us.  He does look splendid, and isn’t Madame Piriac lovely?  I must say I don’t care so much for these French husbands.”

Audrey had to turn and join Miss Ingate in acknowledging the elaborate bow.  At any rate, then, Mr. Gilman had not been utterly estranged by her capricious abandonment of him.  And why should he be?  He was a man of sense; he would understand perfectly when she explained to-morrow.  Further, he was her slave.  She was sure of him.  She would apologise to him.  She would richly recompense him by smiles and honey and charming persuasive simplicity.  And he would see that with all her innocent and modest ingenuousness she was capable of acting seriously and effectively in a sudden crisis.  She would rise higher in his esteem.  As for the foreseen proposal, well——­

A sporadic clapping wakened her out of those reflections.  The conductor was approaching his desk.  The orchestra applauded him.  He tapped the desk and raised his stick.  And there was a loud noise, the thumping of her heart.  The concert had begun.  Musa was still invisible—­what was he doing at that instant, somewhere behind?—­but the concert had begun.  Stars do not take part in the first item of an orchestral concert.  There is a convention that they shall be preluded; and Musa was preluded by the overture to Die Meistersinger.  In the soft second section of the overture, a most noticeable babble came from a stage-box.  “Oh!  It’s the Foas,” muttered Miss Ingate.  “What a lot of people are fussing around them!” “Hsh!” frowned Audrey, outraged by the interruption.  Madame Foa took about fifty bars in which to settle herself, and Monsieur Foa chattered to people behind him as freely as if he had been in a cafe Nobody seemed to mind.