“I think it’s going to be all right, you know,” said he, without preamble. “That last act really went uncommonly well this time. If only Kendal remembers his words, and above all doesn’t try any impromptu funniness, we ought to be all right.” He turned and looked at Martyn through those queer thick lenses of his. “What about trying over that stage fight of ours once more? I still have to learn to die, as the hymn book says.” “Come on then.” He and Martyn went off together, and I thought Sallie looked disappointed. “Go and help them, my dear,” I said ironically. “You’ve still a chance of being in at the death.” “Thanks,” said Sallie coolly. “I think I will.” I did not see them again after that, but I suppose the communication was made, for presently everybody seemed to know that Mr. Harter had returned to England and had unexpectedly appeared in Queen Street, and everybody seemed to want to talk about it. Claire was evidently determined to see Harter as a figure of pathos. I guessed that she had not heard Martyn’s “reptilian” description of him. “So he’s back! Poor fellow. It makes me sick to think of him, toiling there in the heat, probably stinting himself of all but necessities so as to send home money to his wife, while all the time she’s betraying his trust like that.” I said that, from all accounts, trust was about the last sentiment that Mrs. Harter had ever inspired in her husband, and in any case he’d known for years that she didn’t care for him. “God help him!” said Claire sombrely. “An unhappy marriage....” The subject of unhappy marriages is one that, personally, I much prefer to avoid. Claire, however, I think, experiences a certain strange satisfaction in oblique references of which she can make personal application to our own case. But Mary and Mrs. Kendal joined us, and so Claire let the question of unhappy marriages sink into abeyance and asked them if they knew that Mrs. Harter’s husband had just arrived from Egypt. “Has he come?” said Mary. “I heard he was arriving this summer, but I didn’t know he was actually due yet. He’ll be just in time for the play.” I didn’t believe in that nonchalance of Mary’s. It was like a cold, strong wind blowing across the atmosphere of gossip and surmise in which we had all been moving. Her matter-of-factness, for the moment, killed the dramatic possibilities in the arrival of Mr. Harter. We talked of other things. _Chapter Twelve_ After the rehearsal, Captain Patch went to Queen Street. And although I can, again, only reconstruct, at the same time it isn’t exactly that and that only. For Bill, strangely enough, told Nancy Fazackerly about it. I can understand his having done so, in a way. He knew very well that she was in love with another man and also that she knew him to be in love with another woman, and that there could be no question of sex values or sex consciousness between them. Moreover, Patch was naturally open-hearted and Nancy sympathetic.