“But I simply can’t wait another second,” protested Gordon in a high-pitched voice.

“Afraid you’ll have to,” said Gascoigne. “May I introduce Mr. Gordon Palmer, Mr. Weston, Mrs.—mumble-mumble.”

“Forrest,” said the broad lady cheerfully. With the pathetic faith of most colonial ladies in the essential niceness of all young Englishmen, she instantly made friendly advances. Her husband and son looked guarded and her daughter alert.

More guests arrived, among them a big brown man with a very beautiful voice—Dr. Rangi Te Pokiha, a Maori physician, who was staying at the Middleton.

Alleyn came in with Mason and Alfred Meyer, who had given him a box, and greeted him, after a final glance at the supper-table. They made a curious contrast. The famous Mr. Meyer, short, pasty, plump, exuded box-office and front-of-the-house from every pearl button in his white waistcoat. The famous policeman, six inches taller, might have been a diplomat. “Magnificent appearance,” Meyer had said to Carolyn. “He’d have done damn’ well if he’d taken to ‘the business.’”

One by one the members of the company came out from their dressing-rooms. Most actors have an entirely separate manner for occasions when they mix with outsiders. This separate manner is not so much an affectation as a persona, a mask used for this particular appearance. They wish to show how like other people they are. It is an innocent form of snobbishness. You have only to see them when the last guest has gone to realise how complete a disguise the persona may be.

Tonight they were all being very grown up. Alfred Meyer introduced everybody, carefully. He introduced the New Zealanders to each other, the proprietor and proprietress of the Middleton to the station-holder and his family, who of course knew them perfectly well de haut en bas.

Carolyn was the last to appear.

“Where’s my wife?” asked Meyer of everybody at large. “It’s ten to. Time she was making an entrance.”

“Where’s Carolyn?” complained Gordon Palmer loudly.

“Where’s Madame?” shouted George Mason jovially.

Led by Meyer, they went to find out.

Alleyn, who, with Mason, had joined Hambledon, wondered if she was instinctively or intentionally delaying her entrance. His previous experience of leading ladies had been a solitary professional one, and he had very nearly lost his heart. He wondered if by any chance he was going to do so again.

At last a terrific rumpus broke out in the passage that led to the dressing-rooms. Carolyn’s golden laugh, Carolyn saying “O-o-oh!” like a sort of musical train whistle, Carolyn sweeping along with three men in her wake. The double doors of the stage-set were thrown open by little Ackroyd, who announced like a serio-comic butler:

“Enter Madame!”