From the moment Olga appeared, the success of the opera was secure. Cortese, who was conducting, had made his music well; it thoroughly suited her, and she was singing and looking and acting her best. Again and again after the first act the curtain had to go up, and not until the house was satisfied could Georgie turn his glances this way and that to observe the audience. Then in the twilight of a small box on the second tier he espied a woman who was kissing her hand somewhere in his direction, and a man waving a programme, and then he suddenly focussed them and saw who they were. He ran upstairs to visit them, and there was Lucia in an extraordinarily short skirt with her hair shingled, and round her neck three short rows of seed pearls. “Georgino mio!” she cried. “This is a surprise! You came up to see our dear Olga’s triumph. I do call that loyalty. Why did you not tell me you were coming?” “I thought I would call to-morrow,” said Georgie, with his eyes still going backward and forward between the shingle and the pearls and the legs. “Ah, you are staying the night in town?” she asked. “Not going back by the midnight train? The dear old midnight train, and waking in Riseholme! At your club?” “No, I’m staying with Olga,” said Georgie. Lucia seemed to become slightly cataleptic for a moment, but recovered. “No! Are you really?” she said. “I think that is unkind of you, Georgie. You might have told me you were coming.” “But you said that the house wasn’t ready,” said he. “And she asked me.” Lucia put on a bright smile. “Well, you’re forgiven,” she said. “We’re all at sixes and sevens yet. And we’ve seen nothing of dearest Olga--or Mrs. Shuttleworth, I should say, for that’s on the bills. Of course we’ll drive you home, and you must come in for a chat, before Mrs. Shuttleworth gets home, and then no doubt she will be very tired and want to go to bed.” Lucia as she spoke had been surveying the house with occasional little smiles and wagglings of her hand in vague directions. “Ah, there’s Elsie Garroby-Ashton,” she said, “and who is that with her, Pepino? Lord Shrivenham, surely. So come back with me and have ’ickle talk, Georgie. Oh, there’s the Italian Ambassadress. Dearest Gioconda! Such a sweet. And look at the Royal box; what a gathering! That’s the Royal box, Georgie, away to the left--that large one--in the tier below. Too near the stage for my taste: so little illusion----” Lucia suddenly rose and made a profound curtsey.