silently into it. The darkness prevented Jill from seeing his face,
but it was plain that he was suffering, and her sympathy went out to
him. His opinion of the play so obviously coincided with her own.

Presently the first act ended, and the lights went up. There was a
spatter of insincere applause from the stalls, echoed in the
dress-circle. It grew fainter in the upper circle, and did not reach
the gallery at all.

"Well?" said Jill to Derek. "What do you think of it?"

"Too awful for words," said Derek sternly.

He leaned forward to join in the conversation which had started
between Lady Underhill and some friends she had discovered in the
seats in front; and Jill, turning, became aware that the man on her
right was looking at her intently. He was a big man with rough, wiry
hair and a humorous mouth. His age appeared to be somewhere in the
middle twenties. Jill, in the brief moment in which their eyes met,
decided that he was ugly, but with an ugliness that was rather
attractive. He reminded her of one of those large, loose, shaggy dogs
that break things in drawing-rooms but make admirable companions for
the open road. She had a feeling that he would look better in tweeds
in a field than in evening dress in a theatre. He had nice eyes. She
could not distinguish their color, but they were frank and friendly.

All this Jill noted with her customary quickness, and then she looked
away. For an instant she had had an odd feeling that somewhere she
had met this man or somebody very like him before, but the impression
vanished. She also had the impression that he was still looking at