The lights went down here, and he forgot all about them as the curtains rolled slowly up on Cynthia’s first act.

Challoner almost knew the play by heart, but he followed it all eagerly, word by word, as if he had never seen it before, till the big velvet curtains fell together again, and a storm of applause broke the silence.

Challoner rose hastily.  He had just opened the door of the box to go to Cynthia when an attendant entered.  He carried a note on a tray.

“For you, sir.”

Challoner took it wonderingly.  It was written in pencil on a page torn from a pocket-book.

“A lady in the stalls gave it to me, sir,” the attendant explained, vaguely apologetic.

Jimmy unfolded the little slip of paper, and read the faintly pencilled words.  “Won’t you come and speak to us, or have you quite forgotten the old days at Upton House?”

Challoner’s face flashed into eager delight.  What an idiot he had been not to recognise them.  How could he have ever forgotten them?  Of course, the girl in the white frock was Christine, whose mother had given his boyhood all it had ever known of home life!

Of course, he had not seen them for years, but—­dash it all! what an ungrateful brute they must think him!

For the moment even Cynthia was forgotten in the sudden excitement of this meeting with old friends.  Challoner rushed off to the stalls.

“I knew it must be you,” Christine’s mother said, as Jimmy dropped into an empty seat beside her.  “Christine saw you first, but we knew you had not the faintest notion as to who we were, although you bowed so politely,” she added laughing.

“I’m ashamed, positively ashamed,” Jimmy admitted, blushing ingenuously.  “But I am delighted—­simply delighted to see you and Christine again—­I suppose it is Christine,” he submitted doubtfully.

The girl in the white frock smiled.  “Yes, and I knew you at once,” she said.

Challoner was conscious of a faint disappointment as he looked at her.  She had been such a pretty kid.  She had hardly fulfilled all the promise she had given of being an equally pretty woman, he thought critically, not realising that it was the vivid colouring of Cynthia Farrow that had for the moment at least spoilt him for paler beauty.

Christine was very pale and a little nervous-looking.  Her eyes—­such beautiful brown eyes they were—­showed darkly against her fair skin.  Her hair was brown, too, dead brown, very straight and soft.

“By Jove! it’s ripping to see you again after all this time,” Jimmy Challoner broke out again eagerly.  He looked at the mother rather than the daughter, for though he and Christine had been sweethearts for a little while in her pinafore days, Jimmy Challoner had adored Mrs. Wyatt right up to the time when, in his first Eton coat, he had said good-bye to her to go to school and walked right out of their lives.