In the box next to the author’s were Mr. and Mrs. Berkley, Joan and Antony, with Peter back of them, ready to stand if his view were impeded, striving to act as though he had spent years going to first nights in theatre boxes, devoutly hoping that his unaccustomedness to plays was not perceptible to the eyes of the audience, which he imagined were upon him. Joan alone had a divided mind. She had been persuaded to leave her baby with Bibiana. Bibiana had been a devoted nurse to little Anne, but when it came to a baby like Barbara, provided you ever could come to a baby like Barbara, the risk of leaving her was too great to get it out of mind. Joan eagerly waited for the curtain to go up, but at the same time she was wondering if the nursery window was down. The author’s box was the stage box on the left. The audience swayed in an effort to see Latham better, but Richard sat in the shadow of the drapery, additionally screened by a tall man whom those versed in the affairs of the town recognized as Edwin Wilberforce, the painter, Richard Latham’s devoted friend. In the front of the author’s box, leaning absorbed over its edge, utterly unconscious that people noticed her and speculated on whom she was, why she was chosen to be with Latham on this first presentation of his play, sat a little girl. She was dark, thin, not precisely pretty, but there was a ceaseless play of expression upon her eager little face that placed her beyond mere childish prettiness. She was dressed in filmy white material that threatened to be destroyed by her rapid motions. There were many in the audience who had seen the exhibition of American painters in the last week of October and the first week of November, who recognized this child as the original of “The Mystic,” Wilberforce’s picture, the finest picture of the exhibition, the one most discussed, oftenest printed in sepia-tinted Sunday supplements. Little Anne turned at last from her absorbed yet horrified contemplation of shoulder blades and spines in the parquette below, the elevation of the box giving her ample opportunity for her study of anatomy and ethics. She looked up at Ted Wilberforce with shocked eyes and spoke to him with bated breath; Mr. Latham was lucky to be blind, after all, she felt. “Do you s’pose, do you really, truly s’pose, they _all_ thought there wouldn’t be anybody here but just themselves?” little Anne asked. “Poor little Anne!” exclaimed Ted Wilberforce. He pitied the child’s pang at her first dash with the world in which at least one of the inimical triumvirate runs at large. “It’s the custom just now, dear; they don’t see it as we do--in a two-fold sense!” “I’m going to say a prayer for ’em. It’s awful!” groaned little Anne with a shudder. Then she proved that everywhere she behaved as the same little Anne, by closing her eyes, clasping her hands, and moving her lips fast, seated in the front of the stage box.