You’ve altered so much since I saw you! It was odds against my recognizing you at all,” declared Cora, beaming forth into conversation before Christian had fairly grasped the significance of her identity.

“I should never have believed they would make such an Englishman out of you, in just these few months. Let’s see—it was October, wasn’t it? Yes, of course—the First.” She showed her beautiful teeth in a flash of gaiety. “The pheasants weren’t the only ones that got hit that day. But bygones are bygones.... And how do you like London? How do you find it compares with Paris? I always maintain that there’s more real life here, if you know where to look for it.... But I am afraid you’re not glad to see me.”

“There you are wrong. I am glad to see you,” Christian replied, with deliberation. He made his words good by thrusting his plate back upon the table and shaking her gloved hand. There was a frank smile in his eyes.

“Get my glass filled again,” she suggested—“and-your own too—and let’s get out of the way. These people push as if they had had nothing to eat since Christmas. Of all the hogs in evening clothes, the stage-supper hog is the worst. Well, and how have you been, all this time?”

They had moved across the stage to the entrance, and paused near it in a little nook of momentary isolation. Christian made conventional answer to her query, and to other remarks of hers calling for no earnest attention, the while he concentrated his thoughts upon the fact that they were actually standing here together, talking like old friends.

It was sufficiently surprising, this fact, but even more remarkable was the satisfaction he himself was getting from it. There was no room for doubt; he really enjoyed being with her. There was no special need to concern himself with what she was saying. She hardly paused for replies, and seemed not to mind in the least the automatic character of the few which came to her. He had only to smile a little, and nod, and let his eyes glow pleasurably, and she went blithely on. The perception came suddenly to him that he had been sorry also for her. Indeed, now that he reflected upon it, had not hers been the most cruel misfortune of all? The memory of the drawn, agonized mask of a face she had shown, over the tea-table in the conservatory at Caermere, rose in his mind’s vision. He looked up at the strips of canvas and lamps above, with half-closed eyes, recalling in reverie the details of this suffering face; then he turned abruptly to confront her, and observe afresh the happy contrast she presented to-night.

Cora was looking away for the instant, and apparently conveying by lifted eyebrows and shakes of the head a message of some sort to some person on the bustling stage unknown to him. He glanced instinctively in the direction of her signal, but gained no information—and indeed realized at once that he was not in search of any. Of course, she knew everybody here, and would be exchanging nods and smiles of recognition all the evening. It occurred to him to wonder if her husband, that Captain Edward of unpleasant memory, was on the stage, but he had the power to put the thought promptly out of his mind. It was only Cora that he was interested in, and that he wanted to talk with. And here she was, once more looking into his face, and restoring by her smile his almost jocund pleasure in the situation.

He still maintained the rÔle of listener, but it grew increasingly clear to him that when his turn came he would have a good deal to say, and that he would say it well. He had never spoken on familiar terms with an actress before—and the experience put him wonderfully at his ease. He felt that he could say things to her; already he delighted in the assurance of her receptivity, her immunity from starched nonsense, her genial and comforting good fellowship. As he continued to look at her, and to smile, he remembered what people always said, or rather took for granted, about ladies on the stage. The consciousness shaped itself within him that she offered a timely and felicitous compromise—a sort of bridge between those formal, “gun-metal” women of society whom he desired never to see again, and those hapless, unblest creatures of the Empire.

Presently she took his arm, and they moved round to the stalls in front, and found seats a little apart from any one else. A large number of young ladies, in white or light-hued evening dresses, were seated about in the rows before them, and Cora pointed out this one and that among them to Christian. “That is Dolly Montressor—the dancer, you know—her photos are all the rage just now. The girl in pink, over there—just turning round—she is the one who sued young Concannon for breach of promise. You must remember. Her lawyers put the bailiffs in for what she owed them, after they’d taken everything the jury gave her, and she dressed the bailiffs in livery and had them wait at the table at a big supper she gave. The little thicknosed dark man there—next but one to her—he drew a check for the supper and the bailiffs too. You see the small, thin girl with the tomato-colored hair—she didn’t bring her suit into court—one isn’t fox-headed for nothing. She settled outside at the last minute—the Lord Carmody case, you know—and no one’s ever heard a whisper of any supper she ever gave. It isn’t at all her line. She puts it all into South Africans; they say she’s good for thirty thousand pounds, if she’s got a penny. It isn’t bad, you know, on a salary of six quid, and only the pantomime season at that. Oh, there’s Peggy Wiltshire—just in the doorway. She’s the most remarkable woman in England. How old would you think she was? Forty? Why, my dear man, she was billed as a star in the old original Black Crook—just about the time I was born. She can’t be a minute under sixty. But look at her—the neck and shoulders of a girl! Isn’t it amazing! Why, she was knocking about town when your father was a youngster—and here she is still going strong.”

The tables were being cleared from the stage, and the fringe of gentlemen who remained hungry and thirsty was retiring slowly and with palpable reluctance toward the wings. Some sad-faced musicians emerged wearily from an unsuspected cave beneath the footlights, and exhibited their violins and flutes to the general gaze with an air of profound dejection. Their fiddle strings began to whine at one another, in a perfunctory and bad-tempered groping about for something they were expected to have in common. A stout man on the stage vigorously superintended the removal of the last table, and warned off with a comprehensive gesture the lingering remnant of unsated raveners; then, turning, he lifted his hand. On the instant, some score and more of the young ladies in white and pale pinks and blues and lavenders rose from their front stalls, and moved toward the stage door at the left. They pressed forward like a flock of sheep—and with faces as listlessly vacant as any pasture could afford. Christian observed their mechanical exit with a curling lip.

“If these are the renowned beauties, whose fascinations turn the heads of all the young men about town,” he confided to his companion, “then it says extremely little for the quality of what is inside those heads.”

“Yes, isn’t it extraordinary!” she mused at him, eyeing the bevy of celebrities with a ruminating glance. “This must be somewhere near the sixth or seventh lot of ’em that even I’ve seen passing through the turnstile, as you might say. Where do they all come from?—and good heavens! where do they all go to? It’s a procession that never stops, you know. You’d think there was a policeman, keeping it moving. You have these girls here—well, they’re the queens, just for the minute. They own the earth. Nothing in the world is too good for them. Very well: just behind them are some other girls, a few years younger. Goodness knows where they were to-night—in the back ranks of the ballets, perhaps, or doing their little turn at the Paragon or the Canterbury, or doing nothing at all—nothing but keeping their toes pointed in this direction. And they are treading close on the heels of these queens you see here; and behind them are girls of sixteen or so, and behind them the little chits of ten and twelve—and they’re all pushing along—and in time each lot gets in front, out under the limelight, and has its little year on the throne—and then gets shoved off to make room for the next. You might have seen two-thirds of these men here ten years ago. But not the women. Oh, no! Only here and there one—an old stager like Polly Wiltshire—or a middle-aged stager like myself. But we’re merely salt to the porridge.”

“But do you not wish to dance?” he asked her. The orchestra had begun a waltz, and the young ladies from the front stalls, each now attached to a stiffly gyrating male figure, were circling about on the stage, with a floating, wave-like swing of their full skirts which revealed to those below in the stalls rhythmic glimpses of whisking feet and trim black ankles.

“I will dance with you with pleasure,” she replied, promptly.

“Unfortunately”—he began with confusion—“it is ridiculous of me, but I never learned.”

“Oh, then, we will sit here and talk,” she insisted. “I truly don’t want to dance. It’s ever so much cooler and more comfortable here. One has to come to these things, you know—you have to show yourself or you’re like the man who fell out of the balloon—simply not in it. But they’re all alike—all deadly stupid unless you’re young and want to kick your legs about—or unless you find some one you’re particularly glad to see.”

Christian did not seek to evade the implication of the genial glance with which she pointed this last remark. “Yes, it is good of you to stay here with me,” he declared. “Except you and my friend who brought me here—I thought I saw him dancing a moment ago—I don’t know a soul. I have been saying to-day,” he continued, settling down in his seat toward her, “that I make friends badly—I remain here in England almost a stranger.”

“Why, I thought you went everywhere. I know I’m forever seeing your name in the ‘Morning Post.’ You spell it Tower, I notice.”

“Oh, yes, I have been going everywhere—but going as one goes alone through a gallery of pictures. I do not bring out any friends with me.”

She stole a swift glance at him, as she fanned herself. “You surprise me,” she commented. “I should have thought everybody would be running after you.”

“Do they? I am not conscious of it.” He spoke wearily. “If they do, it does not interest me. They are not my kind of people. They take no hold whatever upon my sympathy. They make no appeal to the imagination.”

“You could hardly say that about those ladies’ skirts up there,” she jocosely remarked. “I had no idea silk petticoats flapped so.”

He was not to be diverted from his theme. “It is very funny about me,” he went on. “I seem to make no friends among men, of my own age or any other. Of course there are two or three exceptions—but no more. And as for the majority of women, they attract me still less. Yet when, once in a great while, I do meet some one who really interests me, it is always a woman. These few women whom I have in mind—oh, I could count them on the fingers of one hand—they make a much deeper and more lasting impression on me than any man can make.”

“I believe that frequently happens,” she put in lightly. She did not seem to him to be following his thread of reasoning with conspicuous closeness, but her pleasant smile reassured him.

“I think I am most readily moved on the side of my compassion,” he continued, intent upon the development of his self-analysis. “If I am sorry for the people, it is easier for me to like them—that is, if they are young and pretty women.”

Cora laughed aloud at this, then lapsed abruptly into thoughtfulness. “How do you mean?” she asked.

“To-night I went to the place of the—the promenade—the Empire, is it not? And the sight of the young women there—it terribly affected me. I wanted to shout out that they were all my sisters—that I would protect them all—that they should never be forced by poverty and want to face that miserable humiliation again.” She looked at him, her lips parted over the beautiful teeth, a certain blankness of non-comprehension in the beautiful eyes. As she slowly grasped the drift of his words, the eyes and lips joined in a reserved and baffling smile. “You’re a nice boy,” she decided, “but you’re tremendously young. Those girls are lazy, greedy, good-for-nothing hussies. They wouldn’t do honest work for a living if it was brought to them on a silver salver. They haven’t an idea in their empty painted heads except to wheedle or steal money from drunken fools. They’re nothing but—what d’ye call ’em?—parasites. I’d put ’em all on the treadmill, if I had my way.”

Christian sat up a little, and she was alert in noting the signs of disaffection on his mobile face. “Nevertheless, there is a great sorrow and a great shame in it all,” he said, gravely.

“Oh, that I admit,” she declared, making busy work with her fan. “Of course! Perhaps I spoke more sharply than I meant. Every one is sorry for the poor creatures—but—but I confess I’m sorrier still for the girls who have to work like slaves for the barest necessities of life. Why, my dressmaker’s girls, two of ’em—poor little half-starved sisters who may come at nine or ten o’clock at night to deliver things, or try something on—they get twenty-five shillings a week between them. That’s what gets on my nerve.”

He preserved silence for a time, then suddenly sat upright and faced her. A new light shone in his eyes. “I am the dullest person on earth,” he protested. “All this time I have not thought of it. I want to ask you a thousand things about your sister. Did you not know?—She is my oldest friend in England.”

Cora drew a long breath, and held up her fan for a protracted and attentive inspection. “Oh, yes—you mean Frank,” she said, tentatively.

“Frank? Is that her name? She works. She has a machine À Écrire—a typewriter it is called. You must tell me about her! Is she very well? And where is she to be found? How shall I go about it to recall myself to her?” As there came no immediate response, he put his further meditations into dreamy words: “She spoke the first kind words to me, here in England. I bade farewell to France and the old hard life, in her company. It was she who pointed with her finger for me to have my first look at England—the little, rose-colored island in the green water, with the purple clouds above it. It seemed that we were very close together—on that one day. And I was so full of the thought of seeing her very soon again! And that was September—and now it is very nearly May!. . . But you have not told me! Where is it that she is to be found? Where does she live?”

“She lives at home with my people,” Cora replied, still with reflective deliberation. It was with a visible effort that she shook off the preoccupied air into which she had lapsed. “But you don’t want to go there—it’s out of the world—red-busses and green-busses and a tram and that sort of thing. But she has an office now of her own; that’s where you’d find her most easily. Bless me if I know where it is—it’s between the Strand and the Embankment, but I never can remember which is Norfolk Street and which Arundel Street—and really I’m not sure she’s on either. But my brother is here. I’ll ask him, presently. And so you know Frank?”

“Ah, yes, but you know her better still,” said Christian, softly, nestling again into the corner of his chair nearest her. “I wanted you to tell me about her.”

“Oh, well—but what is there to tell?” she made answer, vaguely. “She is a good girl; she’s frightfully clever; she works very hard, and gives most of her money to her mamma; she’s successful, too, because she’s got a shop of her own, at last—and—and—that’s about all, isn’t it? You know, we’re not by way of seeing much of each other. There’s no quarrel, of course—not the least in the world—but I’m too frivolous to be in her class at all. I dare say it’s my fault—I ought to go and look her up. That’s what I will do, too, one of these days. But—you mustn’t misunderstand me—she’s an awfully good girl, that is, of course, if you like that sort of girl. And she’s pretty, too, don’t you think?”

“Yes, I think so,” affirmed Christian, almost with solemnity. “What time would she come to her office—in the morning, I mean?”

“Oh, don’t ask me!” laughed Cora. “At some ghastly hour, when they have breakfast, I believe, in cabmen’s shelters, and the streets haven’t been swept. I know it only by hearsay. I’ve never stopped up quite as late as that, you know. But you see something like it, driving round by Covent Garden on your way home from a late dance, to see the flowers. Have you ever done that?”

Christian shook his head. The idea attracted him, apparently. “At what hour is it?” he asked, with interest.

“Oh, four or five or something like that. It’s really the prettiest sight you ever saw. I used to go often, at this time of year, and take home a cabload of flowers. But I am getting too old now—and too serious-minded. The mother of a family—you know.”

Christian looked at his watch. “It has occurred to me”—he suggested, hesitatingly—“it is now after two—perhaps we could make a party to go this morning. The dancing will not stop earlier, will it?”

On the stage nothing seemed further from any mind than stopping. There was some complicated kind of set dance in progress, which at the moment involved the spectacle of some score of couples, hands all joined, romping madly around in a gigantic ring. The dresses whirled more wildly than ever; the men crooked their legs and hung outward from the circle as they went, stamping their feet and laughing boisterously. Christian’s eyes singled out one young man who seemed to be making most noise of all—and then he perceived that it was Dicky Westland.

“Perhaps it might be arranged,” Cora replied, after consideration, and with a sidelong eye upon her companion. “I will go behind for a moment, and find my brother, and see what he says. No, you stop here. I will come back again.”

So many people were moving about with entire individual freedom, that he offered no objection to her departure. She pushed her way confidently yet affably past the others in the row, and disappeared at the stage door. He had no clues by which to follow her in fancy after that. Once he thought he distinguished her at the back of the stage—but for the rest it was her sister rather than the friendly Cora who engaged his thoughts. The idea that he was to see her again, quite without delay, seemed to illuminate his whole mind.

In the labyrinth of shunted scenery behind the back-curtain, and along the narrow corridors of dressing-rooms, now devoted to varying hospitable uses, Cora prosecuted what was for a time a fruitless search.

“Where are the gentlemen getting their drinks?” she asked at last of a cloak-room attendant, and the answer simplified her task. Downstairs, at the door of the manager’s room, she was lucky enough to hit upon Major Pirie. “Tell Eddy that’ I want him, will you, old man,” she said, nodding with assurance toward the crowded, smoky little interior, “and if that brother of mine is in there, I want to see him for a minute, too.”

The brother came out first—a slender, overdressed youth, with a face which suggested a cheap and inferior copy of Cora’s. It had the self-complacency without the high spirits—the comeliness of line without the delicacy of texture and charm of color. He was obviously young in years, but he regarded her through the eyes of an elderly and wearied person.

“Hello,” he said, amiably enough. “Goin’ to take Eddy home? He won’t be the worse for a friendly lead. Oh, he’s all right, though, up to now. He’s got rippin’ odds against Perambulator from Hoskins, seventy to three, you know, in fivers. Try and get him to let me in on the bet, will you? I offered to take half of it, the minute the bet was made—but he didn’t answer me. You can work it, if you try, old girl.”

“What’s Frank’s address—her office, I mean?” she put in abruptly, “Got a pencil? Go and get one from somebody. Thirty-two A, you say? Thanks! Now tell Eddy to come out.”

“But what’s up? What do you want with Frank? Anything I can tell her?”

“Never you mind! And don’t lisp a word to her, or to Eddy or to any one else. If it comes off, it’ll be a beano for the lot of us.”

“Right you are,” he assented, with a glimmer of animation. “But say, you won’t forget about the Hoskins bet, will you? If I could even have a third of it! I could do with some odd sovereigns just now, and no mistake.”

“Sh-h! Here he comes. You run away-now, d’ye see; I want to talk with Eddy.”

Captain Edward emerged from the haze of cigarette smoke which veiled the throng within the manager’s room. “Well?” he demanded, with a kind of sulky eagerness.

“I haven’t told him you were here,” Cora began, under her breath, drawing her husband aside down the passage. “It didn’t seem to come into the talk. He thinks I’m here with Tom.”

Edward looked down upon his wife, with a slow, ponderous glance of mingled hope and uneasiness. He pulled at his small yellow mustache, and aimlessly jingled some keys in his pocket.

“You’ve had nearly two hours with him, you know,” he protested, doubtfully.

“Don’t I know it!” she ejaculated, holding up her hands in mock pain at the retrospect. “Good God! If I had a thousand pounds to show for it, I’d say it was the hardest earned money I ever handled.”

“Yes, but you haven’t got anything to show—so far’s I can make out,” he commented with gloom. “You didn’t mention my name at all, eh? But that was what you particularly set out to do, I thought.”

“Well, you thought wrong,” she responded briskly. “I set out to do what was wisest under the circumstances, and I’ve done it. I’ve got an inkling of a game to be played”—she let her eyes twinkle at him as she made this tantalizing little pause—“a game, you old goose, worth seven hundred thousand times anything you ever thought of.”

The ex-hussar regarded her fixedly, the while he pondered her words. “I don’t think I’m very keen about games,” he remarked at last, with obvious suspicion in his tone. “A married woman always gets the worst of games, in the long run.”

She grinned affectionate contempt up at him. “Don’t be such a duffer, Eddy!” she remonstrated with him. “If I had a notion of that sort—do you suppose I’d come and give it away to you? What rot you talk!”

“Yes—but what is your game?” he demanded, doggedly.

“I won’t tell you!” She spoke with great apparent decision. “You’d blab it all over the place. You can no more keep a secret than you can keep a ten-pound note.”

“Oh, I say, Cora,” he urged, in grieved protestation. “You know I’m a regular bailey oyster, where a thing has to be kept dark. You’d better tell me, you know. It’ll keep me from—imaginin’ things.”

The wife smiled. “It’s only a plant I’ve got in my mind,” she explained, after consideration. “What’s the matter with my naming a wife for him, eh?”

Edward, upon reflection, pouted his lips. “Probably you’d come a cropper over it, in the first place,” he objected, slowly, “and then even if you did name the winner, she’d probably welsh us out of our winnings—and besides, what do we want of his marrying at all. The longer he puts off getting married, the less the odds against us gets. I should think even a woman could see that.”

Cora permitted herself a frank yawn. “I’ll explain it to you to-morrow,” she said.

“And now I must go back to my Juggins for a few minutes. I’ll come and fetch you when I’m ready to go.”

“I don’t fancy it much, you know,” he urged upon her as she turned. He took a step toward her, and put his hand on her arm. “If your brother Tom was any good”—he began, with a hard growl in his voice—“by God, I’d have half a mind to talk with him about my plan. Old Pirie’d be no use—but if Tom had the sense and the nerve—why, we’d—”

She had held his eye with a steady, comprehending glance, under the embarrassment of which his speech faltered and then lapsed altogether. “No, the less either you or Tom have to do with your plan the better. Go in now, and take a plain soda, and wait for me! You’ve got no plan, mind you. You’ve simply been dreaming about it. Do you hear? You never had a plan! You can’t have one!”

She spoke with significant authority, and he deferred to it with a sullen upward wag of the head. “All right,” he muttered curtly, and turned on his heel.

“Plain soda, mind!” she called after him, and without waiting for an answer, ran briskly up the steps toward the stage.

Captain Edward’s plain soda had become a remote and almost wholly effaced memory by the time his wife again summoned him from the manager’s room.

“We’ll cut this now, if you don’t mind,” she remarked, in her most casual tone. “I’m as tired as if I’d danced every minute.” She had put on her wraps, and her small, pretty face, framed by the white down of her hood, seemed to his scrutiny to wear an expression of increased contentment.

“Anything fresh?” he asked, as they went in search of his coat and hat.

“Yes—fresh is the word,” she replied, with simulated nonchalance. “Fresh, fresher, freshest—as we used to say at school.”

“Wha’ is it?” he inquired, when they were within touch of the open air. The music was still audible behind them, broken by faint, intermittent echoes of stamping feet and laughing voices.

“I’ll tell you about it in the morning,” she answered listlessly. “I hope to heaven you’ve got a cab-fare.”

“Yes, tha’s all right,” said Edward, waving his stick toward the rank in the dark middle distance of the street. “Whyn’t you tell me all about it?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t get onto it now,” she replied, But later, in the hansom, the desire to unburden her mind achieved the mastery.

“Are you awake?” she demanded, and went on: “He’s not a bad sort, that boy, you know.”

“Damn him!” said Edward, breathing heavily.

“I rather like him myself,” she continued. “He’s a bit slow to talk to, and he’s fresher than Devonshire cream, but there isn’t a drop of the Johnnie in him. He’s as clean as my little girl.”

“Damn him,” repeated her husband, but in a milder and even argumentative tone.

“He’s a proper bundle of nerves, that youngster,” she mused, as if talking to herself. “And whatever those nerves of his tell him to do, he’ll do it. And I’d lay odds he’s goin’ to surprise us all. He’s got something boilin’ in his mind—something that’s just struck him to-night—I could see that. Oh, if I was a man!—I’d get out of this hansom now, and I’d follow that lad, and I’d get hold of him somehow, and I’d bend him any way I chose—that would be something like!—but then again, you take him some other way, and he’s as stubborn as a moke. But I like him, all the same.” She turned toward her husband, and lifted her voice a little. “I like him so much, I’m thinkin’ of havin’ him for a brother-in-law.”

“Strornary thing,” commented Edward, earnestly, “no man’er where I start from, whenever I get t’ the Circus, I get the hiccups.”

Cora put her head back against the cushions, and closed her eyes.