“That is to say, we have the world.”

“I don’t like to believe that,” said Margaret, seriously—­“your definition of the world.”

“You make me see that it was a poor jest,” he said, rising to go.  “By-the-way, we have a friend of yours in our box tonight—­a young Englishman.”

“Oh, Mr. Lyon.  We were all delighted with him.  Such a transparent, genuine nature!”

“Tell him,” said my wife, “that we should be happy to see him at our hotel.”

When Henderson came back to his box Carmen did not look up, but she said, indifferently:  “What, so soon?  But your absence has made one person thoroughly miserable.  Mr. Lyon has not taken his eyes off you.  I never saw such an international attachment.”

“What more could I do for Miss Eschelle than to leave her in such company?”

“I beg your pardon,” said Lyon.  “Miss Eschelle must believe that I thoroughly appreciate Mr. Henderson’s self-sacrifice.  If I occasionally looked over where he was, I assure you it was in pity.”

“You are both altogether too self-sacrificing,” the beauty replied, turning to Henderson a look that was sweetly forgiving.  “They who sin much shall be forgiven much, you know.”

“That leaves me,” Mr. Lyon answered, with a laugh, “as you say over here, out in the cold, for I have passed a too happy evening to feel like a transgressor.”

“The sins of omission are the worst sort,” she retorted.

“You see what you must do to be forgiven,” Henderson said to Lyon, with that good-natured smile that was so potent to smooth away sharpness.

“I fear I can never do enough to qualify myself.”  And he also laughed.

“You never will,” Carmen answered, but she accompanied the doubt with a witching smile that denied it.

“What is all this about forgiveness?” asked Mrs. Eschelle, turning to them from regarding the stage.

“Oh, we were having an experience meeting behind your back, mamma, only Mr. Henderson won’t tell his experience.”

“Miss Eschelle is in such a forgiving humor tonight that she absolves before any one has a chance to confess,” he replied.

“Don’t you think I am always so, Mr. Lyon?”

Mr. Lyon bowed.  “I think that an opera-box with Miss Eschelle is the easiest confessional in the world.”

“That’s something like a compliment.  You see” (to Henderson) “how much you Americans have to learn.”

“Will you be my teacher?”

“Or your pupil,” the girl said, in a low voice, standing near him as she rose.

The play was over.  In the robing and descending through the corridors there were the usual chatter, meaning looks, confidential asides.  It is always at the last moment, in the hurry, as in a postscript, that woman says what she means, or what for the moment she wishes to be thought to mean.  In the crowd on the main stairway the two parties saw each other at a distance, but without speaking.