Him all this time she closely observed. He was not entirely at his ease, when she had been in public with him before she had noticed it, his glance at every new-comer, his conscious summoning of control lest it should be someone whom he had once known, someone who might now, perhaps, not know him. It made him in her eyes all the younger, all the more happily demanding her protection; how terribly she loved him she had never, she thought, realized until this moment. The Haymarket Theatre, where _Mrs. Lemiter's Decision_ had been given to a grateful world for nearly two hundred nights, was next door. In a moment they were there and the band was playing and the lights were up, and then the band was not playing and the lights were down, and she was instantly conscious of the places where his body touched hers and of his hand lying white upon his knee. She, Lizzie Rand, most perfect of private secretaries, most sedate and composed of women, found it all that her self-control could secure that she should not then and there have touched that hand with her own. It was not really a good play. There was a lady, Mrs. Lemiter, who had once done what she should not have done. There were a number of ladies and gentlemen, placed round her by the author, in order that she should, for the benefit of as many audiences as possible, confess what she _had_ done. During the first and second acts Mrs. Lemiter made little dashes towards escape and the author (naturally omniscient) always placed someone in front of her just in time and there were cries of "Not this way, my good woman." At the end of the third act, Mrs. Lemiter, thoroughly bored and exasperated, turned on them all and, for a good twenty minutes, told them what she thought of them. During the fourth act they all assured her that they liked her very much and that, as it was now eleven o'clock and she'd lost her temper so successfully that the house would certainly be filled for many months to come, they'd all better have tea or dinner, whilst a young couple, who had throughout the play loved one another and quarrelled, made it up again. When the play was at an end Lizzie did not know what it had been about. She took his hand and when he was about to hail a cab stopped him. "Let's walk," she said, "it's such a lovely night." He eagerly agreed and they started. III She knew that her moment had come; he knew too--she could tell that because all the way up the Haymarket he said nothing. Piccadilly Circus was a screaming confusion. A music-hall invited you to come and hear "Harry and Clare, drawing-room entertainers." Lights--red and green and gold--flashed and advised drinks and hair-oil and tobacco. Ladies, highly coloured and a little dishevelled; stared haughtily but inquisitively about them, boys shouted newspapers and dived under horses and appeared, miraculously delivered from the wheels of omnibuses.