It is probable that of all the audience, only two men saw that anything had happened, so brief was the frozen instant while she stood transfixed.  One of them was John Galbraith, in the back row, and he let his breath go out again in relief almost in the act of catching it.  He guessed what had happened well enough—­that she’d recognized one of those friends whose potential horror had made her willing to give up her promotion and her little part—­the one she’d spoken of, perhaps, as the “only one that really mattered.”  But it was all right.  She was going on as if nothing had happened.

The other man was Jimmy Wallace himself.  He released, too, a little sigh of relief when he saw her off in her stride again after that momentary falter.  But he hardly looked at the stage after that; stared absently at his program instead, and, presently, availed himself of the dramatic critic’s license and left the theater.

But it wasn’t to go to his desk and write his story (he was on an evening paper and so had no deadline staring him in the face) but to a quiet corner in his club, where he could, undistractedly, think.

From the moment of Rose’s first appearance on the stage he had been tormented by a curiosity as to whether she was indeed Rose, or merely some one unbelievably like her.  Because the fantastic impossibility that Rose Aldrich should be a member of the Globe chorus was reinforced by the fact that her gaze had traveled unconcernedly across his face a dozen times—­his seat was in the fourth row, too—­without the slightest flicker of recognition.  Of course the way she stood there frozen for a second, when at last she did see him, settled that question.  She was Rose Aldrich and she was in the Globe chorus!

But this certainty merely left him with a more insoluble perplexity on his hands; two, in fact—­oh, half a dozen!  What was she doing there?  Did Rodney know?  Well, those questions, and others in their train, could wait.  But—­what was he going to do about it?

As for Rose herself, it was a mere automaton that moved off in the dance and said the two or three lines that remained to her in the act as if nothing had happened, because all her mind and all her capacity for feeling were occupied and tested by something else.

Incredible as it seems, she had utterly overlooked Jimmy—­overlooked the fact that, as a dramatic critic, he’d be certain to be present at the opening performance of The Girl Up-stairs—­certain to be sitting close to the front, and certain, of course, to recognize her the moment she came on the stage.  She hadn’t even had him in mind when the fear lest some one of Rodney’s friends might, for a lark, drop in at the Globe and recognize her, had led her to tell John Galbraith that she couldn’t be in the sextette.  Since that question had been settled, she’d hardly considered the possibility at all.  And, during the three weeks before the opening, since she’d embarked on her career as a costumer, she literally hadn’t given it a thought.