The two Princesses sat together looking kind and serious. As she curtseyed to them they bowed to her and smiled. Behind them she saw a compact mass of acquaintances: Lady Cardington sitting with Sir Donald and looking terribly sad, even self-conscious, yet eager; Mrs. Wolfstein with Mr. Laycock; Mr. Bry, his eyeglass fixed, a white carnation in his coat; Lady Manby laughing with a fat old man who wore a fez, and many others. At the back she saw Fritz, standing up and staring at her with eyes that seemed almost to cry, “Cut her out!” And in the fourth row she saw a dreary, even a horrible, sight--Rupert Carey’s face, disfigured by the vice which was surely destroying him, red, bloated, dreadfully coarsened, spotted. From the midst of the wreckage of the flesh his strange eyes looked out with a vivid expression of hopelessness. Yet in them burned fires, and in fire there is an essence of fierce purity. The soul in those eyes seemed longing to burn up the corruption of his body, longing to destroy the ruined temple, longing to speak and say, “I am in prison, but do not judge of the prisoner by examining the filthiness of his cell.” As Lady Holme took in the audience with a glance there was a rustle of paper. Almost everyone was looking to see if the programme had been altered. Lady Holme saw that suddenly Fritz had realised the change that had been made, and what it meant. An expression of anger came into his face. She felt that she saw more swiftly, and saw into more profoundly to-day than ever before in her life; that she had a strangely clear vision of minds as well as of faces, that she was vivid, penetrating. And she had time, before she began to sing, for an odd thought of the person drowning who flashes back over the ways of his past, who is, as it were, allowed one instant of exceptional life before he is handed over to death. This thought was clear, clean cut in her mind for a moment, and she put herself in the sounding arms of the sea. Then the pianist began his prelude, and she moved a step forward to the flowers and opened her lips to sing.