‘I’ll bet I can find a pass, and prove it possible, within five years,’ said Collis.

‘And if you can? What do I have to do? Promise to give up cigars?’

‘You have to invest one hundred thousand dollars in my railroad company, no questions asked.’

‘But you don’t have a railroad company.’

‘At this rate, it looks as though I very shortly will.’

Sam Lewis let a dribble of cigar smoke escape from between his puckered lips. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘it’s a fair bet, and you’re on. But what will you do for me if you can’t prove that it’s possible?’

‘Mr Lewis,’ said Collis. ‘I’ll buy you this theatre, so that you can have the express pleasure of burning it down.’

Sam Lewis gave a boiled, crimson, crinkly smile. Then he reached across and shook Collis’s hand. ‘You’re definitely on. Definitely. It looks as though I can’t lose either way, and by God, I’ve always wanted to burn down this dangdratted place.’

At that moment, Knickerbocker Jane reached over and touched Collis’s shoulder. He turned towards her, and she nodded her head meaningfully towards the other side of the auditorium. He looked and saw that the curtains at the back of the Melfords’s box were opening, and that the theatre manager himself was ushering the Melford family to their seats.

Knickerbocker Jane, without a word, passed over a pair of mother-of-pearl opera glasses, and Collis raised them to his eyes. The first to take her seat was Althea Melford, a tall, straight-backed woman in her middle forties, with coppery-brown hair drawn back from her face, and dangling ringlets. Her face was sharp, high-cheekboned, and Collis could almost imagine her as a queen of ancient Greece, or as Agrippina, tired of contemplating the ashes of Germanicus, and ready at last for a night of entertainment among hoi polloi. In her pale-blue silk evening gown and her diamonds and pearls, she stepped forward with a classic and haughty mien and sat down as if she were taking her throne.

Behind her, in a tizzy, came a woman who was obviously some relative or visitor, with a muddled hair-style and a black dress that would have been five years out of date in New York. She sat down abruptly and nervously next to Althea Melford, and dropped her purse. The orchestra played ‘When the Moon on the Lake Is Beaming’, but everybody’s attention, surreptitiously or not, was on the Melfords’s box. Someone in the stalls, for no reason at all, started to clap.