Lucia had come up with Kitty Palliser to see the great play.  She looked wretchedly ill.  Withdrawn as far as possible into the darkness of the box, she sat through the tremendous Third Act apparently without a sign of interest or emotion.  Kitty watched her anxiously from time to time.  She wondered whether she were over-tired, or overwrought, or whether she had expected something different and were disappointed with Keith’s tragedy.  Kitty herself wept openly and unashamed.  But to Lucia, who knew that tragedy by heart, it was as if she were a mere spectator of a life she herself had once lived passionately and profoundly.  With every word and gesture of the actors she felt that there passed from her possession something of Keith Rickman’s genius, something sacred, intangible, and infinitely dear; that the triumphant movement of the drama swept between him and her, remorselessly dividing them.  She was realizing for the first time that henceforth he would belong to the world and not to her.  And yet the reiterated applause sounded to her absurd and meaningless.  Why were these people insisting on what she had known so well, had seen so long beforehand?

She was glad that Horace was not with her.  But when he came out of his study to greet them on their return she turned aside into the room and called him to her.  It was then that she triumphed.

“Well, Horace, he has worked his miracle.”

“I always said he would.”

“You doubted—­once.”

“Once, perhaps, Lucia.  But now, like you, I believe.”

“Like me?  I never doubted.  I believed without a miracle.”

She leaned against the chimney-piece, and he saw that she was trembling.  She turned to him a face white with trouble and anxiety.

“Where is he, Horace?”

“He’s still with Maddox.  You needn’t worry, Lucy; if he scores a success like this in Paris that will mean magnificence.”  There was something unspeakably offensive to her in her cousin’s tone.  He did not perceive the disgust in her averted profile.  He puzzled her.  One moment he seemed to be worshipping humbly with her at the inner shrine, the next he forced her to suspect the sincerity of his conversion.  She could see that now his spirit bowed basely before the possibility of the great poet’s material success.

“You’ll meet him if you stay till next week, Lucy.  He’ll be dining here on the tenth.”

Again the tone, the manner hurt her.  Horace could not conceal his pride in the intimacy he had once repudiated.  He so obviously exulted in the thought that some of Rickman’s celebrity, his immortality, perhaps, must through that intimacy light upon him.  For her own part she felt that she could not face Keith Rickman and his celebrity.  His immortality she had always faced; but his celebrity—­no.  It rose up before her, crushing the tender hope that still grew among her memories.  She said to herself that she was as bad as Horace in attaching importance to it; she was so sure that Keith would attach none to it himself.  Yet nothing should induce her to stay for that dinner on the tenth; if it were only that she shrank from the spectacle of Horace’s abasement.