SYLVIA stood before the looking-glass in the Birmingham lodgings and made a speech to herself:

“Humph! You look older, my dear. You look more than nineteen and a half. You’re rather glad, though, aren’t you, to have finished with the last three months? You feel degraded, don’t you? What’s that you say? You don’t feel degraded any more by what you’ve done now than by what you did when you were married? You consider the net result of the last three months has simply been to prove what you’d suspected for a long time—the wrong you did yourself in marrying Philip Iredale? Wait a minute; don’t go so fast; there’s something wrong with your moral sense. You know perfectly well your contention is impossible; or do you accuse every woman who marries to have a position and a home of being a prostitute? Ah, but you didn’t marry Philip for either of those reasons, you say? Yes, you did—you married him to make something like Arbour End.”

Tears welled up in Sylvia’s eyes. She thought she had driven Arbour End from her mind forever.

“Come, come, we don’t want any tears. What are you crying for? You knew when you left Green Lanes that everything which had come into your life through Philip Iredale must be given up. You were rather proud of your ruthlessness. Don’t spoil it now. That’s right, no more tears. You’re feeling a bit abrutie, aren’t you? My advice to you is to obliterate the last three months from your imagination. I quite understand that you suffered a good deal, but novices must be prepared to suffer. In my opinion you can congratulate yourself on having come through so easily. Here you are, a jolly little cabetine with a complete contempt for men. You’re not yet twenty; you’re not likely to fall in love, for you must admit that after those three months the word sounds more than usually idiotic. From what I’ve seen of you I should say that for the future you’ll be very well able to look after yourself; you might even become a famous actress. Ah, that makes you smile, eh?”

Sylvia dabbed her face with the powder-puff and went down-stairs to dinner. Her two companions had not yet begun; for this was the first meal at which they would all sit down together, and an atmosphere of politeness hung over life at present. Lily Haden and Dorothy Lonsdale had joined the “Miss Elsie of Chelsea” company at the same time as Sylvia, and were making their first appearance on any stage, having known each other in the dullness of West Kensington. For a fortnight they had clung together, but, having been given an address for rooms in Birmingham that required a third person’s contribution, they had invited Sylvia to join them. Lily was a tall, slim girl with very fair, golden hair, who had an air of romantic mystery that was due to indolence of mind and body. Dorothy also was fair, with a mass of light-brown hair, a perfect complexion, profile, and figure, and, what finally gave her a really distinguished beauty in such a setting, brown eyes instead of blue. Lily’s languorous grace of manner and body was so remarkable that in a room it was difficult to choose between her and Dorothy, but behind the footlights there was no comparison; there Dorothy had everybody’s glances, and Lily’s less definite features went for nothing.

Each girl was prompt to take Sylvia into her confidence about the other. Thus from Lily she learned that Dorothy’s real name was Norah Caffyn; that she was the eldest of a very large family; that Lily had known her at school; that she had been engaged to a journalist who was disapproved of by her family; that she had offered to break with Wilfred Curlew, if she were allowed to go on the stage; and that she had taken the name of Lonsdale from the road where she lived, and Dorothy from the sister next to her.

“I suppose in the same way as she used to take her dolls?” Sylvia suggested.Lily looked embarrassed. She was evidently not sure whether a joke was intended, and when Sylvia encouraged her to suppose it was, she laughed a little timidly, being rather doubtful if it were not a pun.

“Her sister was awfully annoyed about it, because she hasn’t got a second name. She’s the only one in the family who hasn’t.”

Lily also told Sylvia something about herself, how her mother had lately died and how she could not get on with her sister, who had married an actor and was called Doris. Her mother had been a reciter, and there had always been lots of theatrical people at their house, so it had been easy for her to get an introduction to Mr. Walter Keal, who had the touring rights of all John Richards’s great Vanity Theater productions.

From Dorothy Sylvia learned that she had known Lily at school, but not for long, as Mrs. Haden never paid her daughters’ fees; that Mr. Haden had always been supposed to live in Burmah, but that people who knew Mrs. Haden declared he had never existed; and finally that Lily had been “awfully nice” to herself and helped her to get an introduction to Mr. Walter Keal.

The association of Sylvia with the two girls begun at Birmingham was not interrupted until the end of the tour. Lily and Dorothy depended upon it, Lily because Sylvia saved her the trouble of thinking for herself, Dorothy because she found in Sylvia some one who could deflect all the difficulties of life on tour and leave her free to occupy herself with her own prosperity and her own comforts. Dorothy possessed a selfishness that almost attained to the dignity of ambition, though never quite, as her conceit would not allow her to state an object in her career, for fear of failure; her method was invariably to seize the best of any situation that came along, whether it was a bed, a chair, a potato, or a man; this method with ordinary good luck would insure success through life. Lily was too lazy to minister to Dorothy’s selfishness; moreover, she often managed in taking the nearest and easiest to rob Dorothy of the best.

Sylvia was perfectly aware of their respective characters, but she was always willing to give herself any amount of trouble to preserve beauty around her; Lily and Dorothy were not really more troublesome than two cats would have been; in fact, rather less, because at any rate they could carry themselves, if not their bags.

Life on tour went its course with the world divided into three categories—the members of the company, the public expressing its personality in different audiences, and for the actors saloon-bars and the drinks they were stood, for the actresses admirers and the presents they were worth. Sometimes when the saloon-bars and the admirers were alike unprofitable, the members of the company mixed among themselves whether in a walk round a new town or at tea in rooms where a landlady possessed hospitable virtues. Sylvia had a special gift for getting the best out of landladies, and the men of the company came more often to tea with herself and her friends than with the other ladies. They came, indeed, too often to please Dorothy, who disapproved of Lily’s easy-going acceptance of the sort of love that is made because at the moment there is nothing else to do. She spoke to Sylvia about this, who agreed with her, but thought that with Lily it was inevitable.

“But not with boys in the company,” Dorothy urged, disdainfully. “It makes us all so cheap. I don’t want to put on side, but, after all, we are a little different from the other girls.”

Sylvia found this belief universal in the chorus. She could not think of any girl who had not at one time or another taken her aside and claimed for herself, and by the politeness owed to present company for Sylvia, this “little difference.”

“Personally,” Sylvia said, “I think we’re all much the same. Some of us drop our aitches, others our p’s and q’s; some of us sing flat, the rest sing sharp; and we all look just alike when we’re waiting for the train on Sunday morning.”

Nevertheless, with all her prevision of a fate upon Lily’s conduct, Sylvia did speak to her about the way in which she tolerated the familiarity of the men in the company.

“I suppose you’re thinking of Tom,” Lily said.

“Tom, Dick, and Harry,” Sylvia put in.

“Well. I don’t like to seem stuck up,” Lily explained. “Tom’s always very nice about carrying my bag and getting me tea when we’re traveling.”

“If I promise to look after the bag,” Sylvia asked, “will you promise to discourage Tom?”

“But, my dear, why should you carry my bag when I can get Tom to do it?”

“It bores me to see you and him together,” Sylvia explained. “These boys in the company are all very well, but they aren’t really men at all.”

“I know,” Lily said, eagerly. “That’s what I feel. They don’t seem real to me. Of course, I shouldn’t let anybody make love to me seriously.”

“What do you call serious love-making?”

“Oh, Sylvia, how you do go on asking questions. You know perfectly well what I mean. You only ask questions to make me feel uncomfortable.”

“Just as I might disarrange the cushions of your chair?”

“I know quite well who’s been at you to worry me,” Lily went on. “I know it’s Dorothy. She’s always been used to being the eldest and finding fault with everybody else. She doesn’t really mind Tom’s kissing me—she’s perfectly ready to make use of him herself—but she’s always thinking about other people and she’s so afraid that some of the men she goes out with will laugh at his waistcoat. I’m used to actors; she isn’t. I never bother about her. I don’t complain about her practising her singing or talking for hours and hours about whether I think she looks better with a teardrop or without. Why can’t she let me alone? Nobody ever lets me alone. It’s all I’ve ever asked all my life.”

The feeling between Lily and Dorothy was reaching the point of tension. Sylvia commented on it one evening to Fay Onslow, the oldest member of the chorus, a fat woman, wise and genial, universally known as Onzie except by her best boy of the moment, who had to call her Fay. However, she cost him very little else, and was generally considered to throw herself away, though, of course, as her friends never failed to add, she was getting on and could no longer afford to be too particular.

“Well, between you and I, Sylvia, I’ve often wondered you’ve kept your little family together for so long. I’ve been on the stage now for twenty-five years. I’m not far off forty, dear. I used to be in burlesque at the old Frivolity.”

“Do you remember Victoria Deane?” Sylvia asked.

“Of course I do. She made a big hit and then got married and left the stage. A sweetly pretty little thing, she was. But, as I was saying, dear, in all my experience I never knew two fair girls get through a tour together without falling out, two girls naturally fair, that is, and you mark my words, Lily Haden and Dolly Lonsdale will have a row.”

Sylvia was anxious to avert this, because she would have found it hard to choose between their rival claims upon her. She was fonder of Lily, but she was very fond of Dorothy, and she believed that Dorothy might attain real success in her profession. It seemed more worth while to take trouble over Dorothy; yet something warned her that an expense of devotion in that direction would ultimately be, from a selfish point of view, wasted. Dorothy would never consider affection where advancement was concerned; yet was it not just this quality in her that she admired? There would certainly be an unusual exhilaration in standing behind Dorothy and helping her to rise and rise, whereas with Lily the best that could be expected was to prevent her falling infinitely low.

“How I’ve changed since I left Philip,” she said to herself. “I seem to have lost myself somehow and to have transferred all my interest in life to other people. I suppose it won’t last. God forbid I should become a problem to myself like a woman in a damned novel. Down with introspection, though, Heaven knows, observation in ‘Miss Elsie of Chelsea’ is not a profitable pastime.”

Sylvia bought an eye-glass next day, and though all agreed with one another in private that it was an affectation, everybody assured her that she was a girl who could wear an eye-glass with advantage. Lily thought the cord must be rather a bore.

“It’s symbolic,” Sylvia declared to the dressing-room.

“I think I’ll have my eyes looked at in Sheffield,” said Onzie. “There’s a doctor there who’s very good to pros. I often feel my eyes are getting a bit funny. It may be the same as Sylvia’s got.”

The tour was coming to an end; the last three nights would be played at Oxford, to which everybody looked forward. All the girls who had been to Oxford before told wonderful tales of the pleasures that might be anticipated. Even some of the men were heard to speculate if such or such a friend were still there, which annoyed those who could not even boast of having had a friend there two years ago. The jealous ones revenged themselves by criticizing the theatrical manners of the undergraduate, especially upon the last night of a musical comedy. One heard a great deal of talk, they said, about a college career, but personally and without offense to anybody present who had friends at college, they considered that a college career in nine cases out of ten meant rowdiness and a habit of thinking oneself better than other people.

Sylvia, Lily, and Dorothy had rooms in Eden Square, which was the recognized domain of theatrical companies playing in Oxford. Numerous invitations to lunch and tea were received, and Sylvia, who had formed a preconceived idea of Oxford based upon Philip, was astonished how little the undergraduates she met resembled him. Dorothy managed with her usual instinct for the best to secure as an admirer Lord Clarehaven, or, as the other girls preferred to call him with a nicer formality, the Earl of Clarehaven. He invited her with a friend to lunch at Christ Church on the last day. Dorothy naturally chose Sylvia, and, as Lily was already engaged elsewhere, Sylvia accepted. Later in the afternoon Dorothy proposed that the young men should come back and have tea in Eden Square, and Sylvia divined Dorothy’s intention of proving to these young men that the actress in her own home would be as capable of maintaining propriety as she had been at lunch.

“We’ll buy the cakes on the way,” said Dorothy, which was another example of her infallible instinct for the best and the most economical.

Loaded with Éclairs, meringues, and chocolates, Dorothy, Sylvia, and their four guests reached Eden Square.

“You’ll have to excuse the general untidiness,” Dorothy said, with an affected little laugh, flinging open the door of the sitting-room. She would probably have chosen another word for the picture of Lily sitting on Tom’s knee in the worn leather-backed arm-chair if she had entered first: unfortunately, Lord Clarehaven was accorded that privilege, and the damage was done. Sylvia quickly introduced everybody, and nobody could have complained of the way in which the undergraduates sailed over an awkward situation, nor could much have been urged against Tom, for he left immediately. As for Lily, she was a great success with the young men and seemed quite undisturbed by the turn of events.

As soon as the three girls were alone together, Dorothy broke out:

“I hope you don’t think I’ll ever live with you again after that disgusting exhibition. I suppose you think just because you gave me an introduction that you can do what you like. I don’t know what Sylvia thinks of you, but I can tell you what I think. You make me feel absolutely sick. That beastly chorus-boy! The idea of letting anybody like that even look at you. Thank Heaven, the tour’s over. I’m going down to the theater. I can’t stay in this room. It makes me blush to think of it. I’ll take jolly good care who I live with in future.”

Then suddenly, to Sylvia’s immense astonishment, Dorothy slapped Lily’s face. What torments of mortification must be raging in that small soul to provoke such an unlady-like outburst!

“I should hit her back if I were you, my lass,” Sylvia advised, putting up her eye-glass for the fray; but Lily began to cry and Dorothy flounced out of the room.

Sylvia bent over her in consolation, though her sense of justice made her partly excuse Dorothy’s rage.

“How did I know she would bring her beastly men back to tea? She only did it to brag about having a lord to our digs. After all, they’re just as much mine as hers. I was sorry for Tom. He doesn’t know anybody in Oxford, and he felt out of it with all the other boys going out. He asked me if I was going to turn him down because I’d got such fine friends. I was sorry for him, Sylvia, and so I asked him to tea. I don’t see why Dorothy should turn round and say nasty things to me. I’ve always been decent to her. Oh, Sylvia, you don’t know how lonely I feel sometimes.”

This appeal was too much for Sylvia, who clasped Lily to her and let her sob forth her griefs upon her shoulder.

“Sylvia, I’ve got nobody. I hate my sister Doris. Mother’s dead. Everybody ran her down, but she had a terrible life. Father used to take drugs, and then he stole and was put in prison. People used to say mother wasn’t married, but she was. Only the truth was so terrible, she could never explain. You don’t know how she worked. She brought up Doris and me entirely. She used to recite, and she used to be always hard up. She died of heart failure, and that comes from worry. Nobody understands me. I don’t know what will become of me.”

“My dear,” Sylvia said, “you know I’m your pal.”

“Oh, Sylvia, you’re a darling! I’d do anything for you.”

“Even carry your own bag at the station to-morrow?”

“No, don’t tease me,” Lily begged. “If you won’t tease me, I’ll do anything.”

That evening Mr. Keal, with the mighty Mr. Richards himself, came up from London to see the show. The members of the chorus were much agitated. It could only mean that girls were to be chosen for the Vanity production in the autumn. Every one of them put on rather more make-up than usual, acted hard all the time she was on the stage, and tried to study Mr. Richards’s face from the wings.

“You and I are one of the ‘also rans,’” Sylvia told Lily. “The great man eyed me with positive dislike.”

In the end it was Dorothy Lonsdale who was engaged for the Vanity: she was so much elated that she was reconciled with Lily and told everybody in the dressing-room that she had met a cousin at Oxford, Arthur Lonsdale, Lord Cleveden’s son.

“Which side of the road are you related to him?” Sylvia asked. Dorothy blushed, but she pretended not to understand what Sylvia meant, and said quite calmly that it was on her mother’s side. She parted with Sylvia and Lily very cordially at Paddington, but she did not invite either of them to come and see her at Lonsdale Road.

Sylvia and Lily stayed together at Mrs. Gowndry’s in Finborough Road, for it happened that the final negotiations for Sylvia’s divorce from Philip were being concluded and she took pleasure in addressing her communications from the house where she had been living when he first met her. Philip was very anxious to make her an allowance, but she declined it; her case was undefended. Lily and she managed to get an engagement in another touring company, which opened in August somewhere on the south coast. About this time Sylvia read in a paper that Jimmy Monkley had been sentenced to three years’ penal servitude for fraud, and by an odd coincidence in the same paper she read of the decree nisi made absolute that set Philip and herself free. Old associations seemed to be getting wound up. Unfortunately, the new ones were not promising; no duller collection of people had surely ever been gathered together than the company in which she was working at present. Not only was the company tiresome, but Sylvia and Lily failed to meet anywhere on the tour one amusing person. To be sure, Lily thought that Sylvia was too critical, and therefore so alarming that several “nice boys” were discouraged too early in their acquaintanceship for a final judgment to be passed upon them.

“The trouble is,” said Sylvia, “that at this rate we shall never make our fortunes. I stipulate that, if we adopt a gay life, it really will be a gay life. I don’t want to have soul-spasms and internal wrestles merely for the sake of being bored.”

Sylvia tried to produce Lily as a dancer; for a week or two they worked hard at imitations of the classical school, but very soon they both grew tired of it.

“The nearest we shall ever get to jingling our money at this game,” Sylvia said, “is jingling our landlady’s ornaments on the mantelpiece. Lily, I think we’re not meant for the stage. And yet, if I could only find my line, I believe.... I believe.... Oh, well, I can’t, and so there’s an end of it. But look here, winter’s coming on. We’ve got nothing to wear. We haven’t saved a penny. Ruin stares us in the face. Say something, Lily; do say something, or I shall scream.”

“I don’t think we ought to have eaten those plums at dinner. They weren’t really ripe,” Lily said.

“Well, anyhow, that solves the problem of the moment. Put your things on. You’d better come out and walk them off.”

They were playing in Eastbourne that week, where a sudden hot spell had prolonged the season farther into September than usual; a new company of entertainers known as “The Highwaymen” was attracting audiences almost as large as in the prime of summer. Sylvia and Lily paused to watch them from the tamarisks below the Marina.

Suddenly Sylvia gave an exclamation.

“I do believe that’s Claude Raglan who’s singing now. Do you remember, Lily, I told you about the Pink Pierrots? I’m sure it is.”

Presently the singer came round with the bag and a packet of his picture post-cards. Sylvia asked if he had a photograph of Claude Raglan. When he produced one she dug him in the ribs, and cried:

“Claudie, you consumptive ass, don’t you recognize me? Sylvia.”

He was delighted to see her again, and willingly accepted an invitation to supper after the show, if he might bring a friend with him.

“Jack Airdale—an awfully decent fellow. Quite a good voice, too, though I think from the point of view of the show it’s a mistake to have a high barytone when they’ve already got a tenor. However, he does a good deal of accompanying. In fact, he’s a much better accompanist than he is singer.”

“I suppose you’ve got more girls than ever in love with you, now you wear a mask?” said Sylvia.

Claude seemed doubtful whether to take this remark as a compliment to his voice or as an insult to his face. Finally he took it as a joke and laughed.

“Just the same, I see,” he said. “Always chaffing a fellow.”

Claude Raglan and Jack Airdale came to supper in due course. Sylvia liked Jack; he was a round-faced young man in the early twenties, with longish light hair that flopped all over his face when he became excited. Sylvia and he were good friends immediately and made a great deal of noise over supper, while Claude and Lily looked at each other.

“How’s the consumption, Claudie?” Sylvia asked.

Claude sighed with a soulful glance at Lily’s delicate form.

“Don’t imagine she’s sympathizing with you,” Sylvia cried. “She’s only thinking about plums.”

“He’s grown out of it,” Airdale said. “Look at the length of his neck.”

“I have to wear these high collars. My throat....” Claude began.

“Oh, shut up with your ailments,” Sylvia interrupted.

“Hear, hear,” Airdale shouted. “Down with ailments,” and he threw a cushion at Claude.

“I wish you wouldn’t behave like a clown,” said Claude, smoothing his ruffled hair and looking to see if Lily was joining in the laugh against him.

Presently the conversation turned upon the prospects of the two girls for next winter, about which Sylvia was very pessimistic.

“Why don’t we join together and run a street show—Pierrot, Pierrette, Harlequin, and Columbine?” Airdale suggested. “I’ll swear there’s money in it.”

“About enough to pay for our coffins,” said Claude. “Sing out of doors in the winter? My dear Jack, you’re mad.”

Sylvia thought the idea was splendid, and had sketched out Lily’s Columbine dress before Lily herself had realized that the conversation had taken a twist.

“Light-blue crÊpe de Chine with bunches of cornflowers for Columbine. Pierrette in dark blue with bunches of forget-me-nots, Pierrot in light blue. Silver and dark-blue lozenges for Harlequin.”

“Paregoric lozenges would suit Claude better,” said Airdale. “O Pagliacci! Can’t you hear him? No, joking apart, I think it would be a great effort. We sha’n’t have to sing much outside. We shall get invited into people’s houses.”

“Shall we?” Claude muttered.

“And if the show goes,” Airdale went on, “we might vary our costumes. For instance, we might be Bacchanals in pink fleshings and vine leaves.”

“Vine leaves,” Claude ejaculated. “Vine Street more likely.”

“Don’t laugh, old boy, with that lung of yours,” said Airdale, earnestly.

In the end, before the company left Eastbourne, it was decided, notwithstanding Claude’s lugubrious prophecies, to launch the enterprise; when the tour broke up in December Sylvia had made dresses both for Lily and for herself as she had first planned them with an eye only for what became Lily. Claude’s hypochondria was appeased by letting him wear a big patchwork cloak over his harlequin’s dress in which white lozenges had been substituted for silver ones, owing to lack of money. They hired a small piano very much like the one that belonged to the Pink Pierrots, and on Christmas Eve they set out from Finborough Road, where Claude and Jack had rooms near Mrs. Gowndry’s. They came into collision with a party of carol-singers who seemed to resent their profane competition, and, much to Jack Airdale’s disappointment, they were not invited into a single house; the money taken after three hours of wandering music was one shilling and fivepence in coppers.

“Never mind,” said Jack. “We aren’t known yet. It’s a pity we didn’t start singing last Christmas Eve. We should have had more engagements than we should have known what to do with this year.”

“We must build up the show for next year,” Sylvia agreed, enthusiastically.

“I shall sing the ‘Lost Chord’ next year,” Claude answered. “They may let me in, if I worry them outside heaven’s gates, to hear that last Amen.”

Jack and Sylvia were justified in their optimism, for gradually the Carnival Quartet, as they called themselves, became known in South Kensington, and they began to get engagements to appear in other parts of London. Jack taught Sylvia to vamp well enough on the guitar to accompany herself in duets with him; Claude looked handsome in his harlequin’s dress, which prosperity had at last endowed with silver lozenges; Lily danced actively enough for the drawing-rooms in which they performed; Sylvia, inspired by the romantic exterior of herself and her companions, invented a mime to the music of Schumann’s “Carnival” which Jack Airdale played, or, as Claude said, maltreated.

The Quartet showed signs of increasing vitality with the approach of spring, and there was no need to think any more of touring in musical comedy, which was a relief to Sylvia. When summer came, they agreed to keep together and work the South Coast.

However, all these plans came suddenly to nothing, because one misty night early in March Harlequin and Columbine lost Pierrot and Pierrette on the way home from a party in Chelsea; a brief note from Harlequin to Pierrot, which he found when he got home, indicated that the loss should be considered permanent.

This treachery was a shock to Sylvia, and she was horrified at herself for feeling it so deeply. Ever since that day in Oxford when Lily had sobbed out her griefs, Sylvia had concentrated upon her all the capacity for affection which had begun to blossom during the time she was with Philip and which had been cut off ruthlessly with everything else that belonged to life with him. She knew that she should have foreseen the possibility, nay the probability, of this happening, but she had charmed herself with the romantic setting of their musical adventure and let all else go.

“I’m awfully sorry, Sylvia,” said Jack; “I ought to have kept a better lookout on Claude.”

“It’s not your fault, old son. But, O God! why can’t four people stay friends without muddling everything up with this accursed love?”

Jack was sympathetic, but it was useless to confide in him her feeling for Lily; he would never understand. She would seem to him so little worth while; for him the behavior of such a one meant less than the breaking of a porcelain figure.

“It did seem worth while,” Sylvia said to herself, that night, “to keep that frail and lovely thing from this. It was my fault, of course, for I knew both Lily and Claude through and through. Yet what does it matter? What a fool I am. It was absurd of me to imagine we could go on forever as we were. I don’t really mind about Lily; I’m angry because my conceit has been wounded. It serves me right. But that dirty little actor won’t appreciate her. He’s probably sick of her easiness already. Oh, why the hell am I not a man?”

Presently, however, Sylvia’s mood of indignation burned itself out; she began to attribute the elopement of Claude and Lily to the characters they had assumed of Harlequin and Columbine, and to regard the whole affair as a scene from a play which must not be taken more deeply to heart than with the pensive melancholy that succeeds the fall of the curtain on mimic emotions. After all, what had Lily been to her more than a puppet whose actions she had always controlled for her pleasure until she was stolen from her? Without Lily she was once more at a loose end; there was the whole history of her sorrow.

“I can’t think what they wanted to run away for,” said Jack. Sylvia fancied the flight was the compliment both Harlequin and Columbine had paid to her authority.

“I don’t find you so alarming,” he said.

“No, old son, because you and I have always regarded the Quartet from a strictly professional point of view, and consequently each other. Meanwhile the poor old Quartet is done in. We two can’t sustain a program alone.”

Airdale gloomily assented, but thought it would be well to continue for a week or so, in case Claude and Lily came back.

“I notice you take it for granted that I’ll be willing to continue busking with them,” Sylvia said.

That evening Airdale and she went out as usual; but the loss of the other two seemed somehow to have robbed the entertainment of its romantic distinction, and Sylvia was dismayed to find with what a shameful timidity she now took herself and her guitar into saloon-bars; she felt like a beggar and was humiliated by Jack’s apologetic manner, and still more by her own instinctive support of such cringing to the benevolence of potmen and barmaids.

One evening, after about a week of these distasteful peregrinations, the two mountebanks came out of a public house in Fulham Road where they had been forced to endure a more than usually intolerable patronage. Sylvia vowed she would not perform again under such conditions, and they turned up Tinderbox Lane to wander home. This thoroughfare, only used by pedestrians, was very still, and trees planted down the middle of the pavement gave to the mild March evening an effluence of spring. Sylvia began to strum upon her guitar the tune that Arthur Madden and she sang together from the windows at Hampstead on the night she met him first; her companion soon caught hold of the air, and they strolled slowly along, dreaming, she looking downward of the past, he of the future with his eyes fixed on the chimneys of the high flats that encircled the little houses and long gardens of Tinderbox Lane. They were passing a wall on their right in which numbered doors were set at intervals. From one of these a tall figure emerged and stopped a moment to say good-by to somebody standing in the entrance. The two musicians with a simultaneous instinct for an audience that might appreciate them stopped and addressed their song to the parting pair, a tall old gentleman with drooping gray whiskers, very much muffled up, and an exceedingly stout woman of ripe middle age.

“Bravo!” said the old gentleman, in a tremulous voice, as he tapped his cane on the pavement. “Polly, this is devilish appropriate. By gad! it makes me feel inclined to dance again, Polly,” and the old gentleman forthwith postured with his thin legs like a cardboard antic at the end of a string. The fat woman standing in the doorway came out into the lamplight, and clasping her hands in alarm, begged him not to take cold, but the old gentleman would not stop until Polly had made a pretense of dancing a few steps with him, after which he again piped, “Bravo,” vowed he must have a whisky, and invited Sylvia and Jack to come inside and join them.

“Dashwood is my name, Major-General Dashwood, and this is Mrs. Gainsborough.”

“Come along,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “The captain—”

“She will call me Captain,” said the general, with a chuckle. “Obstinate gal! Knew me first when I was a captain, thirty-six years ago, and has never called me anything since. What a woman, though!”

“He’s very gay to-night. We’ve been celebrating our anniversary,” Mrs. Gainsborough explained, while the four of them walked along a gravel path toward a small square creeper-covered house at the end of a very long garden.

“We met first at the Argyll Rooms in March, 1867, and in September, 1869, Mulberry Cottage was finished. I planted those mulberry-trees myself, and they’ll outlive us both,” said the general.

“Now don’t let’s have any more dismals,” Mrs. Gainsborough begged. “We’ve had quite enough to-night, talking over old times.”

Mulberry Cottage was very comfortable inside, full of mid-Victorian furniture and ornaments that suited its owner, who, Sylvia now perceived by the orange lamplight, was even fatter than she had seemed at first. Her hair, worn in a chignon, was black, her face was rosy and large, almost monumental, with a plinth of chins.

The general so much enjoyed having a fresh audience for his tales, and sat so long over the whisky, that Mrs. Gainsborough became worried.

“Bob, you ought to go. You know I don’t like to argue before strangers, but your sister will be getting anxious. Miss Dashwood’s quite alone,” she explained to her guests. “I wonder if you’d mind walking back with him?” she whispered to Sylvia. “He lives in Redcliffe Gardens. That’s close to you, isn’t it?”

“If we can have music all the way, by gad! of course,” said the general, standing up so straight that Sylvia was afraid he would bump his head on the ceiling.

“Now, Bob dear, don’t get too excited and do keep your muffler well wrapped round your throat.”

The general insisted on having one more glass for the sake of old times, and there was a short delay in the garden, because he stuck his cane fast in the ground to show the size of the mulberry-trees when he planted them, but ultimately they said good night to Mrs. Gainsborough, upon whom Sylvia promised to call next day, and set out for Redcliffe Gardens to the sound of guitars.

General Dashwood turned round from time to time to shake his cane at passers-by that presumed to stare at the unusual sight of an old gentleman, respectable in his dress and demeanor, escorted down Fulham Road by two musicians.

“Do you see anything so damned odd in our appearance?” he asked Sylvia.

“Nothing at all,” she assured him.

“Sensible gal! I’ve a very good mind to knock down the next scoundrel who stares at us.”

Presently the general, on whom the fresh air was having an effect, took Sylvia’s arm and grew confidential.

“Go on playing,” he commanded Jack Airdale. “I’m only talking business. The fact is,” he said to Sylvia, “I’m worried about Polly. Hope I shall live another twenty years, but fact is, my dear, I’ve never really got over that wound of mine at Balaclava. Damme! I’ve never been the same man since.”

Sylvia wondered what he could have been before.

“Naturally she’s well provided for. Bob Dashwood always knew how to treat a woman. No wife, no children, you understand me? But it’s the loneliness. She ought to have somebody with her. She’s a wonderful woman, and she was a handsome gal. Damme! she’s still handsome—what? Fifty-five you know. By gad, yes. And I’m seventy. But it’s the loneliness. Ah, dear, if the gods had been kind; but then she’d have probably been married by now.”

The general blew his nose, sighed, and shook his head. Sylvia asked tenderly how long the daughter had lived.

“Never lived at all,” said the general, stopping dead and opening his eyes very wide, as he looked at Sylvia. “Never was born. Never was going to be born. Hale and hearty, but too late now, damme! I’ve taken a fancy to you. Sensible gal! Damned sensible. Why don’t you go and live with Polly?”

In order to give Sylvia time to reflect upon her answer, the general skipped along for a moment to the tune that Jack was playing.

“Nothing between you and him?” he asked, presently, indicating Jack with his cane.

Sylvia shook her head.

“Thought not. Very well, then, why don’t you go and live with Polly? Give you time to look round a bit. Understand what you feel about playing for your bread and butter like this. Finest thing in the world music, if you haven’t got to do it. Go and see Polly to-morrow. I spoke to her about it to-night. She’ll be delighted. So shall I. Here we are in Redcliffe Gardens. Damned big house and only myself and my sister to live in it. Live there like two needles in a haystack. Won’t ask you in. Damned inhospitable, but no good because I shall have to go to bed at once. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind pressing the bell? Left my latch-key in me sister’s work-basket.”

The door opened, and the general, after bidding Sylvia and Jack a courteous good night, marched up his front-door steps with as much martial rigidity as he could command.

On the way back to Finborough Road, Sylvia, who had been attracted to the general’s suggestion, postponed raising the question with Jack by telling him about her adventure in Redcliffe Gardens when she threw the bag of chestnuts through the window. She did not think it fair, however, to make any other arrangement without letting him know, and before she went to see Mrs. Gainsborough the next day she announced her idea and asked him if he would be much hurt by her backing out of the busking.

“My dear girl, of course not,” said Jack. “As a matter of fact, I’ve had rather a decent offer to tour in a show through the East. I should rather like to see India and all that. I didn’t say anything about it, because I didn’t want to let you down. However, if you’re all right, I’m all right.”

Mrs. Gainsborough by daylight appealed to Sylvia as much as ever. She told her what the general had said, and Mrs. Gainsborough begged her to come that very afternoon.

“The only thing is,” Sylvia objected, “I’ve got a friend, a girl, who’s away at present, and she might want to go on living with me.”

“Let her come too,” Mrs. Gainsborough cried. “The more the merrier. Good Land! What a set-out we shall have. The captain won’t know himself. He’s very fond of me, you know. But it would be more jolly for him to have some youngsters about. He’s that young. Upon my word, you’d think he was a boy. And he’s always the same. Oh, dearie me! the times we’ve had, you’d hardly believe. Life with him was a regular circus.”

So it was arranged that Sylvia should come at once to live with Mrs. Gainsborough in Tinderbox Lane, and Jack went off to the East.

The general used to visit them nearly every afternoon, but never in the evening.

“Depend upon it, Sylvia,” Mrs. Gainsborough said, “he got into rare hot water with his sister the other night. Of course it was an exception, being our anniversary, and I dare say next March, if we’re all spared, he’ll be allowed another evening. It’s a great pity, though, that we didn’t meet first in June. So much more seasonable for jollifications. But there, he was young and never looked forward to being old.”

The general was not spared for another anniversary. Scarcely a month after Sylvia had gone to live with Mrs. Gainsborough, he died very quietly in the night. His sister came herself to break the news, a frail old lady who seemed very near to joining her brother upon the longest journey.

“She’ll never be able to keep away from him,” Mrs. Gainsborough sobbed. “She’ll worry and fret herself for fear he might catch cold in his coffin. And look at me! As healthy and rosy as a great radish!”

The etiquette of the funeral caused Mrs. Gainsborough considerable perplexity.

“Now tell me, Sylvia, ought I or ought I not to wear a widow’s veil? Miss Dashwood inviting me in that friendly way, I do want to show that I appreciate her kindness. I know that strictly we weren’t married. I dare say nowadays it would be different, but people was much more old-fashioned about marrying ballet-girls when I was young. Still, it doesn’t seem hardly decent for me to go gallivanting to his funeral in me black watered silk, the same as if I were going to the upper boxes of a theater with Mrs. Marsham or Mrs. Beardmore.”

Sylvia told Mrs. Gainsborough that in her opinion a widow’s cap at the general’s funeral would be like the dash of mauve at the wedding in the story. She suggested the proper thing to do would be to buy a new black dress unprofaned by visits to the upper boxes.

“If I can get such an out size in the time,” Mrs. Gainsborough sighed, “which is highly doubtful.”

However, the new dress was obtained, and Mrs. Gainsborough went off to the funeral at Brompton.

“On, it was a beautiful ceremony,” she sobbed, when she got home. “And really Miss Dashwood, well, she couldn’t have been nicer. Oh, my poor dear captain, if only all the clergyman said was true. And yet I should feel more comfortable somehow if it wasn’t. Though I suppose if it was true there’d be no objection to our meeting in heaven as friends only. Dear me, it all sounded so real when I heard the clergyman talking about it. Just as if he was going up in a lift, as you might say. So natural it sounded. ‘A gallant soldier,’ he said, ‘a veteran of the Crimea.’ So he was gallant, the dear captain. You should have seen him lay out two roughs who tried to snatch me watch and chain once at the Epsom Derby. He was a gentleman, too. I’m sure nobody ever treated any woman kinder than he treated me. Seventy years old he was. Captain Bob Dashwood of the Seventeenth Hussars. I can see him now as he used to be. He liked to come stamping up the garden. Oh, he was a stamper, and ‘Polly,’ he hollered out, ‘get on your frills. Here’s Dick Avon—the Markiss of Avon that was’ (oh, he was a wild thing) ‘and Jenny Ward’ (you know, she threw herself off Westminster Bridge and caused such a stir in Jubilee year). People talked a lot about it at the time. I remember we drove to the Star and Garter at Richmond that day—a lovely June day it was—and caused quite a sensation, because we all looked so smart. Oh, my Bob, my Bob, it only seems yesterday.”

Sylvia consoled Mrs. Gainsborough and rejoiced in her assurance that she did not know what she should have done.

“Fancy him thinking about me being so lonely and wanting you to come and live with me. Depend upon it he knew he was going to die all of a sudden,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “Oh, there’s no doubt he was clever enough to have been a doctor. Only of course with his family he had to be a soldier.”

Sylvia mostly spent these spring days in the garden with Mrs. Gainsborough, listening to her tales about the past and helping her to overlook the labors of the jobbing gardener who came in twice a week. Her landlady or hostess (for the exact relation was not yet determined) was very strict in this regard, because her father had been a nursery gardener and she insisted upon a peculiar knowledge of the various ways in which horticultural obligations could be avoided. When Sylvia raised the question of her status at Mulberry Cottage, Mrs. Gainsborough always begged her not to be in a hurry to settle anything; later on, when Sylvia was able to earn some money, she should pay for her board, but payment for her lodging, so long as Mrs. Gainsborough was alive and the house was not burned to the ground, was never to be mentioned. That was certainly the captain’s intention and it must be respected.

Sylvia often went to see Mrs. Gowndry in Finborough Road in case there should be news of Lily. Her old landlady was always good enough to say that she missed her, and in her broken-up existence the affection even of Mrs. Gowndry was very grateful.

“I’ve told me old man to keep a good lookout for her,” said Mrs. Gowndry.

“He’s hardly likely to meet her at his work,” Sylvia said.

“Certainly not. No. But he often goes up to get a breath of air—well—it isn’t to be expected that he wouldn’t. I often say to him when he comes home a bit grumblified that his profession is as bad as a miner’s, and they only does eight hours, whereas in his lavatory they does twelve. Too long, too long, and it must be fidgety work, with people bobbing in and out all the time and always in a hurry, as you might say. Of course now and again you get a lodger who makes himself unpleasant, but, year in year out, looking after lodgers is a more peaceful sort of a life than looking after a lavatory. Don’t you be afraid, Miss Scarlett. If ever a letter comes for you our Tommy shall bring it straight round, and he’s a boy as can be trusted not to lose anything he’s given. You wouldn’t lose the pretty lady’s letter, would you, Tommy? You never lose nothing, do you?”

“I lost a acid-drop once.”

“There, fancy him remembering. That’s a hit for his ma, that is. He’d only half sucked this here acid-drop and laid it aside to finish sucking it when he went up to bed, and I must have swept it up, not thinking what it was. Fancy him remembering. He don’t talk much, but he’s a artful one.”

Tommy had a bagful of acid-drops soon after this, for he brought a letter to Sylvia from Lily:

DEAR SYLVIA,—I suppose you’re awfully angry with me, but Claude went on tour a month ago, and I hate being alone. I wonder if this will find you. I’m staying in rotten rooms in Camden Town. 14 Winchester Terrace. Send me a card if you’re in London.

Loving, LILY.