This particular season, a short one of three weeks given by an Italian company that had been touring Mexico during the winter, opened with a performance of "Rigoletto." For the first night Mortimer Gault procured one of the lower boxes, leaving it to his wife to fill it with such company as she desired, provided a seat was left for him in the background, where he could hear and would not have to talk. The party, which consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Gault, Letitia, John, Tod McCormick, and his sister Pearl, was late in arriving, and it was not until the interval between the second and third acts that they found time to look about the house. Letitia and Pearl were in the front of the box, the latter on the inner side nearest the audience, with John Gault sitting behind her in the shadow of the curtain. While Letitia looked about the house through her lorgnon she could hear the animated chatter of Pearl, interspersed with comments from Maud Gault and Tod. "Do you see that woman in the box opposite--the pale one with the piece of blue velvet twisted in her hair? She came up with the company, and her husband is a professional gambler in Mexico and makes heaps of money. You can ask Tod if you don't believe me." Tod said it was all true, and that she was a "peach," a form of encomium that, in his vast appreciation, he was fond of applying to every member of the other sex that came within range of his admiring eye. "In the box above, where the two good-looking men are, that little red, squeezed-looking woman is Lady Jervis, who used to be Tiny Madison ever so long ago. She went abroad and married Sir Somebody or other Jervis, and she's out here now with a syndicate." "What is she doing with a syndicate?" Mrs. Gault asked. "Is she going on the stage?" "No; they're buying mines or railroads or something. Her husband's in it, and all the others, they say, are English lords. That's part of the syndicate with her now, in the box." "What part of the syndicate?" said Tod. "The head, or the feet, or the middle?" "Don't get gay, Tod," said his sister, severely; "I don't like small boys when they're too funny. Down there in the audience, near the middle of the parquet, is the woman whose husband is something or other in Central America. He's enormously rich, and she comes up here once a year and buys clothes. They say she used to be on the stage, and she looks just like it; she has such a lot of paint round her eyes and such vaudeville hair. But you ought to see her children! They're quite black, just like little negroes. Major Conway, who lived down there a good deal, says that Central American children are all dark when they're young, and then it wears off as they grow older." "Do they use sapolio?" inquired Tod. Pearl treated this inquiry with fitting scorn, and continued: