So he went to his lodgings; and there, having changed his dress, he found himself with the evening before him. He walked round to his club, read one or two letters that awaited him, went up to the smoking-room and found not a human being in the place—nothing but empty easy-chairs, chess-board tables, dishevelled magazines, and a prevailing odour of stale cigars—and then he went out and proceeded in the direction of the theatre in which Annie Brunel was at that moment playing. That goal had been uppermost in his thoughts ever since he left Calais pier in the morning. The tall, pale, muscular man—and people noticed that he had his right arm in a sling—who now paid his four or five shillings, walked upstairs, and slunk into the back seat of the dress-circle, was as nervous and as much afraid of being seen as a schoolboy thieving fruit. Perhaps it was the dread of seeing, as much as the fear of being seen, that made his heart beat; perhaps it was only expectation; but he bethought himself that in the twilight of the back seats of the circle his figure would be too dusky to be recognised, especially by one who had to look—if she looked at all—over the strong glare of the footlights. The act drop was down when he entered—the orchestra playing the last instalment of Offenbach’s confectionery music. The whole house was in the act of regarding two young ladies, dressed as little as possible in white silk, with wonderful complexions, towers of golden hair on their heads, and on their faces an assumed unconsciousness of being stared at, who occupied a box by themselves. The elder of them had really beautiful features of an old French type—the forehead low and narrow, the eyelids heavy, the eyes large, languid, melancholy, the nose thin and a little _retroussée_, the mouth small, the lips thin and rather sad, the cheeks blanched and a trifle sunken, the line of the chin and neck magnificent. The beautiful, sad woman sate and stared wistfully at the glare of the gas; sometimes smiling, in a cold way, to her companion, a plump, commonplace beauty of a coarse English type, who had far too much white on her forehead and neck. Together, however, they seemed to make a sufficiently pretty picture to provoke that stolid British gaze which has something of the idiot but more of the animal in it.