She made up her mind to leave the sapphire at home; but in her last moment in her room the resolution failed her. Harry, of course, would be angry if he knew, but Harry wouldn't see the thing under her glove.
She came down to where Clara was waiting for her, with the guilty feeling of a child who has concealed a contraband cake; but the way Clara looked her over made her conscious that she had not concealed her excitement. Clara was always cool. What would it be like, she wondered, to feel the same about everything? How would it seem to be no more elated by the expectation of listening to the most beautiful of tenors than over the next meeting of the Decade Club? Was that what she was coming to in time? Not to-night, she thought; and not, at least, while that talisman of romance clasped her around the third finger.
They found Harry waiting for them in the theater lobby. He had come up too late from Burlingame to do more than meet the party there. The Bullers were already in the box, he said, and the second act of _I' Pagliacci_ just beginning.
As they came to the door of the box the lights were down, the curtain up on a dim stage, and the chorus still floating into the roof, while the three occupants of the box were indistinguishable figures, risen up and shuffling chairs to the front for Flora and Clara. It was too dark to distinguish faces.
But dark as it was, Flora knew who was sitting behind her. She heard him speaking. Under the notes of the recitative he was speaking to Clara. The pleasure of finding him here was sharpened by the surprise. She listened to his voice, the mere intonation of which brought back to her their walk through the Presidio woods as deliciously as if she were still there.
Then, as the tenor took up the theme, all talking ceased--Ella's husky whisper, Clara's smoother syllables, and the flat, slow, variable voice of Kerr--the whole house seemed to sink into stiller repose; the high chords floated above the heads of the black pit like colored bubbles, and Flora forgot the sapphire in the triple spell of the singing, the darkness, and the face she was yet to see. She felt relaxed and released from her guard by this darkness around her, that blotted out the sea of faces beneath, that dissolved the walls and high galleries, that obscured the very outline of the box where she sat, until she seemed to be poised, half-way up a void of darkness, looking into a pit in the hollowness of which a voice was singing.