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- and my own hand, trembling, rose to catch it. The crowd gave a broad, indulgent cheer of pleasure, and a laugh. She held my flustered gaze with her own more certain one, and made me a little bow. Then she stepped backwards suddenly, waved to the hall, and left us.
    I sat for a moment as if stunned, my eyes upon the flower in my hand, which had been so near, so recently, to Kitty Butler’s cheek. I wanted to raise it to my own face - and was about to, I think, when the clatter of the hall pierced my brain at last, and made me look about me and see the inquisitive, indulgent looks that were turned my way, and the nods and the chuckles and the winks that met my up-turned gaze. I reddened, and shrank back into the shadows of the box. With my back turned to the bank of prying eyes I slipped the rose into the belt of my dress, and pulled on my gloves. My heart, which had begun to pound when Miss Butler had stepped towards me across the stage, was still beating painfully hard; but as I left my box and made my way towards the crowded foyer and the street beyond, it began to feel light, and glad, and I began to want to smile. I had to place a hand before my lips so as not to appear an idiot, smiling to myself as if at nothing.
    Just as I was about to step into the street, I heard my name called. I turned, and saw Tony, crossing the lobby with his arm raised to catch my eye. It was a relief to have a friend, at last, to smile at. I took the hand away, and grinned like a monkey.
    â€˜Hey, hey,’ he said breathlessly when he reached my side, ‘someone’s merry, and I know why! How come girls never look so gay as that, when I give them roses?’ I blushed again, and returned my fingers to my lips, but said nothing. Tony smirked.
    â€˜I’ve got a message for you,’ he said then. ‘Someone to see you.’ I raised my eyebrows; I thought perhaps Alice or Freddy were here, come to meet me. Tony’s smirk broadened. ‘Miss Butler,’ he said, ‘would like a word.’
    My own grin faded at once. ‘A word?’ I said. ‘Miss Butler? With me?’
    â€˜That’s right. She asked Ike, the fly-man, who was the girl that sat in the box every night, on her own, and Ike said you was a pal of mine, and to ask me. So she did. And I told her. And now she wants to see you.’
    â€˜What for? Oh, Tony, what on earth for? What did you tell her?’ I caught hold of his arm and gripped it hard.
    â€˜Nothing, except the truth -’ I gave his arm a twist. The truth was terrible. I didn’t want her to know about the shivering and the whispering, the flame and the streaming light. Tony prised my fingers from his sleeve, and held my hand. ‘Just that you like her,’ he said simply. ‘Now will you come along, or what?’
    I did not know what to say. So I said nothing, but let him lead me away from the great glass doors with the blue, cool, Canterbury night behind them, past the archway that led to the stalls, and the staircase to the gallery, towards an alcove in the far corner of the foyer, with a curtain across it, and a rope before it, and a sign swinging from the rope, marked Private.

Chapter 2

    I had been back stage at the Palace with Tony once or twice before, but only in the daytime, when the hall was dim and quite deserted. Now the corridors along which I walked with him were full of light and noise. We passed one doorway that led, I knew, to the stage itself: I caught a glimpse of ladders and ropes and trailing gas-pipes; of boys in caps and aprons, wheeling baskets, manœuvring lights. I had the sensation then - and I felt it again in the years that followed, every time I made a similar trip back stage - that I had stepped into the workings of a giant clock, stepped through the elegant casing to the dusty, greasy, restless machinery that lay, all hidden from the common eye, behind it.
    Tony led me down a passageway that stopped at a metal staircase, and