I was in fact so early that the outrush of the audience from the first performance almost swept me off my feet. Thereafter, a cold wind blowing fog from the river made standing a chilly business. With an eye on the Central Station clock I paced up and down, warming myself, less with this activity than with the prospect of seeing Nora. But time was going on. Ten, five, three minutes to nine … now the curtain must be going up. I began to worry. Had I mistaken the date, or come to the wrong door? Fifteen minutes late, as I was on the point of leaving, they arrived. The party was larger than I expected: Terence and Miss Josephine Gilhooley, Nora, Miss Donohue, and a hard-looking young man in an expensive suit who turned out to be Miss Donohue’s brother. They were all in a mood of combined and well-established gaiety which induced the belief that they had probably had dinner together. The suspicion that I had been excluded from this prior event was confirmed by the effusiveness with which, by way of compensation, they greeted me.
