“Oh yes,” affirmed Addie.  “Even now, cricket is his one temptation.”

Esther was silent.  Her Raphael seemed toppling to pieces.  The silence seemed to communicate itself to her companions.  Addie broke it by sending Sidney to smoke a cigarette in the lobby.  “Or else I shall feel quite too selfish,” she said.  “I know you’re just dying to talk to some sensible people.  Oh, I beg your pardon, Esther.”

The squire of dames smiled but hesitated.

“Yes, do go,” said Esther.  “There’s six or seven minutes more interval.  This is the longest wait.”

“Ladies’ will is my law,” said Sidney, gallantly, and, taking a cigarette case from his cloak, which was hung on a peg at the back of a box, he strolled out.  “Perhaps,” he said, “I shall skip some Shakspeare if I meet a congenial intellectual soul to gossip with.”

He had scarce been gone two minutes when there came a gentle tapping at the door and, the visitor being invited to come in, the girls were astonished to behold the young gentleman with the dyed carnation and the crimson silk handkerchief.  He looked at Esther with an affable smile.

“Don’t you remember me?” he said.  The ring of his voice woke some far-off echo in her brain.  But no recollection came to her.

“I remembered you almost at once,” he went on, in a half-reproachful tone, “though I didn’t care about coming up while you had another fellow in the box.  Look at me carefully, Esther.”

The sound of her name on the stranger’s lips set all the chords of memory vibrating—­she looked again at the dark oval face with the aquiline nose, the glittering eyes, the neat black moustache, the close-shaved cheeks and chin, and in a flash the past resurged and she murmured almost incredulously, “Levi!”

The young man got rather red.  “Ye-e-s!” he stammered.  “Allow me to present you my card.”  He took it out of a little ivory case and handed it to her.  It read, “Mr. Leonard James.”

An amused smile flitted over Esther’s face, passing into one of welcome.  She was not at all displeased to see him.

“Addie,” she said.  “This is Mr. Leonard James, a friend I used to know in my girlhood.”

“Yes, we were boys together, as the song says,” said Leonard James, smiling facetiously.

Addie inclined her head in the stately fashion which accorded so well with her beauty and resumed her investigation of the stalls.  Presently she became absorbed in a tender reverie induced by the passionate waltz music and she forgot all about Esther’s strange visitor, whose words fell as insensibly on her ears as the ticking of a familiar clock.  But to Esther, Leonard James’s conversation was full of interest.  The two ugly ducklings of the back-pond had become to all appearance swans of the ornamental water, and it was natural that they should gabble of auld lang syne and the devious routes by which they had come together again.