The Second Honeymoon | Page 3

him he could not think. He met so many
people in his rather aimless life it was impossible to remember them
all.
His eyes turned to them again and again. There was something very
familiar in the face of the elder woman--something---- Challoner knit
his brows. Who the dickens----
The lights went down here, and he forgot all about them as the curtains
rolled slowly up on Cynthia's first act.
Challoner almost knew the play by heart, but he followed it all eagerly,
word by word, as if he had never seen it before, till the big velvet
curtains fell together again, and a storm of applause broke the silence.
Challoner rose hastily. He had just opened the door of the box to go to

Cynthia when an attendant entered. He carried a note on a tray.
"For you, sir."
Challoner took it wonderingly. It was written in pencil on a page torn
from a pocket-book.
"A lady in the stalls gave it to me, sir," the attendant explained, vaguely
apologetic.
Jimmy unfolded the little slip of paper, and read the faintly pencilled
words. "Won't you come and speak to us, or have you quite forgotten
the old days at Upton House?"
Challoner's face flashed into eager delight. What an idiot he had been
not to recognise them. How could he have ever forgotten them? Of
course, the girl in the white frock was Christine, whose mother had
given his boyhood all it had ever known of home life!
Of course, he had not seen them for years, but--dash it all! what an
ungrateful brute they must think him!
For the moment even Cynthia was forgotten in the sudden excitement
of this meeting with old friends. Challoner rushed off to the stalls.
"I knew it must be you," Christine's mother said, as Jimmy dropped
into an empty seat beside her. "Christine saw you first, but we knew
you had not the faintest notion as to who we were, although you bowed
so politely," she added laughing.
"I'm ashamed, positively ashamed," Jimmy admitted, blushing
ingenuously. "But I am delighted--simply delighted to see you and
Christine again--I suppose it is Christine," he submitted doubtfully.
The girl in the white frock smiled. "Yes, and I knew you at once," she
said.
Challoner was conscious of a faint disappointment as he looked at her.
She had been such a pretty kid. She had hardly fulfilled all the promise

she had given of being an equally pretty woman, he thought critically,
not realising that it was the vivid colouring of Cynthia Farrow that had
for the moment at least spoilt him for paler beauty.
Christine was very pale and a little nervous-looking. Her eyes--such
beautiful brown eyes they were--showed darkly against her fair skin.
Her hair was brown, too, dead brown, very straight and soft.
"By Jove! it's ripping to see you again after all this time," Jimmy
Challoner broke out again eagerly. He looked at the mother rather than
the daughter, for though he and Christine had been sweethearts for a
little while in her pinafore days, Jimmy Challoner had adored Mrs.
Wyatt right up to the time when, in his first Eton coat, he had said
good-bye to her to go to school and walked right out of their lives.
"And what are you doing now, Jimmy?" Mrs. Wyatt asked him. "I
suppose I may still call you Jimmy?" she said playfully.
"Rather! please do! I'm not doing anything, as a matter of fact,"
Challoner explained rather vaguely. "I've got rooms in the Temple, and
the great Horatio sends me a quarterly allowance, and expects me not to
live beyond it." He made a little grimace. "You remember my brother
Horace, of course!"
"Of course I do! Is he still abroad?"
"Yes, he'll never come back now; not that I want him to," Jimmy
hastened to add, with one of those little inward qualms that shook him
whenever he thought of his brother, and what that brother would say
when he knew that he was shortly to be asked to accept Cynthia Farrow
as a sister-in-law.
The great Horatio, as Jimmy disrespectfully called the head of his
family, loathed the stage. It was his one dread that some day the
blueness of his blood might run the risk of taint by being even remotely
connected with one of its members.
"He's not married, of course?" Mrs. Wyatt asked.

Challoner chuckled. "Married! Good Lord, no!" He leaned a little
forward to look at Christine.
"And you?" he asked. "Has the perfect man come along yet?"
It had been an old joke of his in the far away days, that Christine would
never marry until she found a perfect man. She had always had such
quaintly romantic fancies behind the seriousness of her beautiful brown
eyes.
She flushed