She would be in London in a month’s time, but he would take care to be out of reach.  He would not meet those glorious eyes or touch that hand again till the die was cast,—­upon the fate of Elvira he staked his own.  The decision brought him a strange kind of peace, and he went back to his papers and his books like a man who has escaped from the grasp of some deadly physical ill into a period of comparative ease and relief.

CHAPTER VII

It was a rainy November night.  A soft continuous downpour was soaking the London streets, without, however, affecting their animation or the nocturnal brightness of the capital, for the brilliance of the gas-lamps was flashed back from innumerable patches of water, and every ray of light seemed to be broken by the rain into a hundred shimmering reflections.  It was the hour when all the society of which an autumnal London can boast is in the streets, hurrying to its dinner or its amusements, and when the stream of diners-out, flowing through the different channels of the west, is met in all the great thoroughfares by the stream of theatre-goers setting eastward.

The western end of D——­ Street was especially crowded, and so was the entrance to a certain narrow street leading northwards from it, in which stood the new bare buildings of the Calliope.  Outside the theatre itself there was a dense mass of carriages and human beings, only kept in order by the active vigilance of the police, and wavering to and fro with kaleidoscopic rapidity.  The line of carriages seemed interminable, and, after those who emerged from them had run the gauntlet of the dripping, curious, good-tempered multitude outside, they had to face the sterner ordeal of the struggling well-dressed crowd within, surging up the double staircase of the newly-decorated theatre.  The air inside was full of the hum of talk, and the whole crowd had a homogeneous, almost a family air, as though the contents of one great London salon had been poured into the theatre.  Everybody seemed to know everybody else; there were politicians, and artists, and writers of books, known and unknown; there were fair women and wise women and great ladies; and there was that large substratum of faithful, but comparatively nameless, persons on whom a successful manager learns to depend with some confidence on any first night of importance.

And this was a first night of exceptional interest.  So keen, indeed, had been the competition for tickets that many of those present had as vague and confused an idea of how they came to be among the favoured multitude pouring into the Calliope as a man in a street panic has of the devices by which he has struggled past the barrier which has overthrown his neighbour.  Miss Bretherton’s first appearance in Elvira had been the subject of conversation for weeks past among a far larger number of London circles than generally