inquiry, while she, noting his silence, believed him to be eating his heart out.  In the end it was the desire to relieve and to satisfy Janet that took him to the Age office.  It might be impossible for her to make such inquiries, he told himself, but no obligation could possibly attach to him, except—­and his heart throbbed affirmatively at this—­the obligation of making Janet happier about it.  He could have laughed, aloud when he heard the scheme from Rattray’s lips—­it so perfectly filled out his picture, his future projection of Elfrida; he almost assured himself that he had imagined and expected it.  But his desire to relieve Janet was suddenly lost in an upstarting brood of impulses that took him to the railway station with the smile still upon his lips.  Here was a fresh development; his interest was keenly awake again, he would go and verify the facts.  When his earlier intention reoccurred to him in the train, he dismissed it with the thought that what he had seen would be more effective, more disillusionizing, than what he had merely heard.  He triumphed in advance over Janet’s disillusion, but he thought more eagerly of the pleasure of proving, with his own eyes, another step in the working out of the problem which he believed he had solved in Elfrida.

“Big house to-night, sir.  All the stalls taken,” said the young man with the high collar in the box office when Kendal appeared before the window.

“Pit,” replied Kendal, and the young man stared.

“Pit did you say, sir?  Well, you’ll ’ave to look slippy or you won’t get a seat there either.”

Kendal was glad it was a full house.  He began to realize how very much he would prefer that Elfrida should not see him there.  From his point of view it was perfectly warrantable—­he had no sense of any obligation which would prevent his adding to his critical observation of her—­but from Miss Bell’s?  He found himself lacking the assurance that no importance was to be attached to Miss Bell’s point of view, and he turned up his coat collar and pulled his hat over his eyes, and seated himself as obscurely as possible, with a satisfactory sense that nobody could take him for a gentleman, mingled with a less agreeable suspicion that it was doubtful whether, under the circumstances, he had a complete right to the title.  The overture strung him up more pleasureably than usual, however.  He wondered if he should recognize her at once, and what part she would have.  He did not know the piece, but of course it would be a small one.  He wondered—­for, so far as he knew, she had had no experience of the stage—­how she could have been got ready in the time to take even a small one.  Inevitably it would be a part with three words to say and nothing to sing—­probably a maid-servant’s.  He smiled as he thought how sincerely Elfrida would detest such a personation.  When the curtain rose at last Mr. John Kendal searched the stage more eagerly than the presence there of any mistress of her art had ever induced him to do before.  The first act was full of gaiety, and the music was very tolerable; but Kendal, scanning one insistent figure and painted face after another, heard nothing, in effect, of what was said or sung—­he was conscious only of a strong disappointment when it was over and Elfrida had not appeared.