The Captain's eyes, it
is true, were fixed upon the scene; his head was bent a little, his
magnificent beard rippled over the expanse of his shirt-front. But
Bernard was not slow to see that his gaze was heavy and opaque, and
that, though he was staring at the actresses, their charms were lost
upon him. He saw that, like himself, poor Lovelock had matter for
reflection in his manly breast, and he concluded that Blanche's
ponderous swain was also suffering from a sense of disjunction. Lovelock
sat in the same posture all the evening, and that his imagination had
not projected itself into the play was proved by the fact that during
the entractes he gazed with the same dull fixedness at the curtain.
Bernard forebore to interrupt him; we know that he was not at this
moment socially inclined, and he judged that the Captain was as little
so, inasmuch as causes even more imperious than those which had operated
in his own case must have been at the bottom of his sudden appearance in
London. On leaving the theatre, however, Bernard found himself detained
with the crowd in the vestibule near the door, which, wide open to the
street, was a scene of agitation and confusion. It had come on to rain,
and the raw dampness mingled itself with the dusky uproar of the Strand.
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