It was but three weeks since they had parted with Isabel Bretherton in Paris, and they were feeling on this first night something of the anxiety and responsibility which parents feel when they launch a child upon whom they have expended their best efforts into a critical world.
As for Eustace, he also had but that afternoon arrived in London.

He had been paying a long duty-visit to some aged relatives in the North, and had so lengthened it out, in accordance with the whim which had taken possession of him in Surrey, that he had missed all the preparations for _Elvira_, and had arrived upon the scene only at the moment when the final _coup_ was to be delivered.

Miss Bretherton had herself sent him a warm note of invitation, containing an order for the first night and an appeal to him to come and 'judge me as kindly as truth will let you.' And he had answered her that, whatever happened, he would be in his place in the _Calliope_ on the night of the 20th of November.
And now here he was, wearing outwardly precisely the same aspect of interested expectation as those around him, and all the time conscious inwardly that to him alone, of all the human beings in that vast theatre, the experience of the evening would be so vitally and desperately important, that life on the other side of it would bear the mark of it for ever.

It was a burden to him that his sister suspected nothing of his state of feeling; it would have consoled him that she should know it, but it seemed to him impossible to tell her.
'There are the Stuarts,' he said, bending down to her as the orchestra struck up, 'in the box to the left.

Forbes, I suppose, will join them when it begins.