"Really Miss Mardon's impossible!" Charmian was saying a moment later to Alston Lake.

"Why, Mrs. Charmian?"

"Oh, I don't know! She always looks on the dark side."

"With eyes like hers what else can she do? Isn't it going stunningly?"

"Alston, I must tell you--you're an absolute darling!"

She nearly kissed him. A bell sounded.

"Third act!" exclaimed Alston, in his resounding baritone.

Charmian escaped, feeling much more hopeful, indeed almost elated.

Alston was right. With eyes like hers how could Enid Mardon antic.i.p.ate good things?

Nevertheless Charmian remembered that she had called the libretto a masterpiece.

Oh! the agony of these swiftly changing moods! She felt as if she were being tossed from one to another by some cruel giant. She tried to look forward. She said to herself, "Very soon we shall know! All this will be at an end."

But when the third act was finished she felt as if never could there be an end to her acute nervous anxiety. For the third act did not go well.

The locusts were all wrong. The lighting did not do. Most of the "effects" missed fire. There were stoppages, there were arguments, there was a row between Miss Mardon and Signor Meroni. Pa.s.sages were re-tried, chaos seemed to descend upon the stage, engulfing the opera and all who had anything to do with it. Charmian grew cold with despair.

"Thank G.o.d Adelaide did go away!" she said to herself at half-past one in the morning.

She turned her head and saw Mrs. Shiffney and Jonson Ramer sitting in the stalls not far from her. Mrs. Shiffney made a friendly gesture, lifting up her right hand. Charmian returned it, and set her teeth.

"What does it matter? I don't care!"

The act ended as it had begun in chaos. In the finale something went all wrong in the orchestra, and the whole thing had to be stopped. Miss Mardon was furious. There was an altercation.

"This," said Charmian to herself, "is my idea of h.e.l.l."

She felt that she was being punished for every sin, however tiny, that she had ever committed. She longed to creep away and hide. She thought of all she had done to bring about the opera, of the flight from England, of the life at Djenan-el-Maqui, of the grand hopes that had lived in the little white house above the sea.

"Start it again, I tell you!" roared Crayford. "We can't stand here all night to hear you talking!"

"Yes," a voice within Charmian said, "this is h.e.l.l!"

She bent her head. She felt like one sinking down.

When the act was over she went out at once. She was afraid of Mrs.

Shiffney.

The smiling colored man took her up in the elevator to a room where she found Claude in his shirt sleeves, with a cup of black coffee beside him, working at the score. He looked up.

"Charmian! I've just finished all I can do to-night. What's the time?"

"Nearly two."

"Did the third act go well?"

She looked at his white face and burning eyes.

"Yes," she said.

"Sit down. You look tired."

He went on working.

Just as two o'clock struck he finished, and got up from the table over which he had been leaning for hours.

"Come along! Let's go down. Oh!"

He stopped, and drank the black coffee.

"By the way," he said, "won't you have some?"

"Yes," she said eagerly.

He rang and ordered some for her. While they were waiting for it she said:

"What an experience this is!"

"Yes."

"How quietly you take it!"

"We're in for it. It would be no use to lose one's head."

"No, of course! But--oh, what a fight it is. I can scarcely believe that in a few days it must be over, that we shall _know_!"

"Here's the coffee. Drink it up."

She drank it. They went down in the lift. As they parted--for Claude had to go to Meroni--Charmian said:

"Adelaide Shiffney's still here."

"If she stays to the end we must find out what she thinks."

"Or--shall we leave it? After all--"

"No, no! I wish to hear her opinion."

There was a hard dry sound in his voice.

"Very well."