‘Well,’ he said, ‘don’t run out on me. That’d be unfair, if you like. No dresser. No understudy. A damn shabby trick. As for this background music, I know where it arises. It’s a more complex business than you may suppose. I shall attend to it.’ He moved behind her chair, and rested his hand on its back. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘shall we “clap hands and a bargain”? How say you?’

Martyn said slowly: ‘I don’t see how I can do anything but say yes.’

‘There’s my girl.’ His hand brushed across her head and he moved away.

‘Though I must say,’ Martyn added, ‘you do well to quote Petruchio. And Henry V, if it comes to that.’

‘A brace of autocratic male animals? Therefore it must follow, you are “Kate” in two places. And—shrewd Kate, French Kate, kind Kate but never curs’t Kate—you will rehearse at eleven tomorrow, hold or cut bowstrings. Agreed?’

‘I am content.’

‘Damned if you look it, however. All right. I’ll have a word with that girl. Good day to you, Kate.’

‘Good day, sir,’ said Martyn.

That night the second dress-rehearsal went through as for performance, without, as far as Martyn knew, any interruption during the action.

She stayed throughout in one or the other of Miss Hamilton’s dressing-rooms and, on the occasions when she was in transit, contrived to be out of the way of any players. In the second act, her duties kept her in the improvised dressing-room on the stage and she heard a good deal of the dialogue.

There is perhaps nothing that gives one so strong a sense of theatre from the inside as the sound of invisible players in action. The disembodied and remote voices, projected at an unseen mark, the uncanny quiet off-stage, the smells and the feeling that the walls and the dust listen, the sense of a simmering expectancy; all these together make a corporate life so that the theatre itself seems to breathe and pulse and give out a warmth. This warmth communicated itself to Martyn and, in spite of all her misgivings, she glowed and thought to herself. ‘This is my place. This is where I belong.’

Much of the effect of the girl’s part in this act depended, not so much on what she said, which was little, but on mime and on that integrity of approach, which is made manifest in the smallest gesture, the least movement. Listening to Miss Gainsford’s slight uncoloured voice Martyn thought: ‘But perhaps if one watched her it would be better. Perhaps something is happening that cannot be heard; only seen.’