J. G. Darcey and Parry Percival walked on to the set and took up their positions. Helena Hamilton came out of her dressing-room. She stood with her hands clasped lightly at her waist at a little distance from the door by which she must enter. A figure emerged from the shadows near the passage and went up to her.

‘Miss Hamilton,’ Martyn said nervously, ‘I’m not on for your quick change. I can do it.’

Helena turned. She looked at Martyn for a moment with an odd fixedness. Then a smile of extraordinary charm broke across her face and she took Martyn’s head lightly between her hands.

‘My dear child,’ she murmured, ‘my ridiculous child.’ She hesitated for a moment and then said briskly: ‘I’ve got a new dresser.’

‘A new dresser?’

‘Jacko. He’s most efficient.’

Poole came down the passage. She turned to him and linked her arm through his. ‘She’s going to be splendid in her scene,’ she said. ‘Isn’t she?’

Poole said: ‘Keep it up, Kate. All’s well.’ And in the look he gave Helena Hamilton there was something of comradeship, something of compassion and something, perhaps, of gratitude.

Dr Rutherford emerged from the passage and addressed himself to Martyn: ‘Here!’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking for you, my pretty. You might be a lot worse, considering, but you haven’t done anything yet. When you play this next scene, my poppet, these few precepts in thy—’

‘No, John,’ Poole and Helena Hamilton said together. ‘Not now.’

He glowered at them. Poole nodded to Martyn who began to move away but had not got far before she heard Rutherford say: ‘Have you tackled that fellow? Did you see it? Where is he? By God, when I get at him—’

‘Stand by,’ said Clem Smith.

‘Quiet, John,’ said Poole imperatively. ‘Back to your box, sir.’

The curtain rose on the second act.

For the rest of her life the physical events that were encompassed by the actual performance of the play were to be almost lost for Martyn: indeed she could not be perfectly certain that they had happened at all. She might have been under hypnosis or some partial anaesthesia for all the reality they afterwards retained.