Certainly she looked younger than usual. He was positive of that: still positive when he saw her standing by Miss Van Tuyn and taking her hand. Then she turned to him and gave him a friendly and careless, almost haphazard, greeting, still smiling and looking ready for anything. And then at once they went into the restaurant up the broad steps. And Craven noticed that everyone they passed by glanced at Lady Sellingworth. At that moment he felt very proud of her friendship. He even felt a touch of romance in it, of a strange and unusual romance far removed from the sort of thing usually sung of by poets and written of by novelists. “She is unusual!” he thought. “And so am I; and our friendship is unusual too. There has never before been anything quite like it.” And he glowed with a warming sense of difference from ordinary life. But Miss Van Tuyn was claiming his urgent attention, and a waiter was giving him Whitstable oysters, and Chablis was being poured into his glass, and the band was beginning to play a selection from the music of Grieg, full of the poetry and the love of the North, where deep passions come out of the snows and last often longer than the loves of the South. He must give himself up to it all, and to the wonderful white-haired woman, too, with the great diamonds gleaming in her ears. It really was quite a buoyant dinner, and Braybrooke began to feel more at ease. He had told them all where they were going afterwards, but had said nothing about Walter’s description of the play. None of them had seen it, but Craven seemed to know all about it, and said it was an entertaining study of life behind the scenes at the opera, with a great singer as protagonist. “He was drawn, I believe, from a famous baritone.” During a great part of her life Lady Sellingworth had been an ardent lover of the opera, and she had known many of the leading singers in Paris and London. “They always seemed to me to be torn by jealousy,” she said, “and often to suffer from the mania of persecution! Really, they are like a race apart.” And the conversation turned to jealousy. Braybrooke said he had never suffered from it, did not know what it was. And they smiled at him, and told him that then he could have no temperament. Craven declared that he believed almost the whole human race knew the ugly intimacies of jealousy in some form or other. “And yourself?” said Miss Van Tuyn. “I!” he said, and looking up saw Lady Sellingworth’s brilliant eyes fixed on him. “Do you know them?” “I have felt jealousy certainly, but never yet as I could feel it.” “What! You are conscious of a great capacity for feeling jealous, a capacity which has never yet had its full fling?” said the girl. “Yes,” he said. And his lips were smiling, but there was a serious look in his eyes. And they discussed the causes of jealousy. “We shall see it to-night on the stage in its professional form,” said Craven.