The Second Honeymoon | Page 3

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 now, shaking her head. "And you?" she asked. "Are you married?"
Challoner said "No" very quickly. He wondered whether he ought to tell them about Cynthia. The thought reminded him of his promise to go to her after the first act. He rose hastily to his feet.
"I quite forgot. I've got an appointment. If you'll excuse me, I'll come back, if I may."
He bowed himself off. Christine's beautiful eyes followed him wistfully.
"I never thought he'd be half so good-looking when he grew up," she said. "And yet somehow he hasn't altered much, has he?"
"He hasn't