It took two maids to fill Kate’s place in the Dyces’ household—one for the plain boiling of potatoes and the other for her pious atmosphere, as the lawyer argued; and a period of discomfort attended on what Bell called their breaking-in. No more kitchen nights for Lennox, now that she was a finished young lady and her friend was gone: she must sit in the parlour strumming canzonets on Grandma Buntain’s Broadwood, taming her heart of fire. It was as a voice from heaven’s lift there came one day a letter from London in which Mrs Molyneux invited her and one of her aunts for an Easter holiday.

“Indeed and I’ll be glad to be quit for a week or two of both of you,” said Bell to her niece and Ailie. “Spring-cleaning, with a couple of stupid huzzies in the kitchen,—not but what they’re nice and willing lassies,—is like to be the sooner ended if we’re left to it ourselves.”

A radiant visage and lips in firm control betrayed how Lennox felt. She had never been in London—its cry went pealing through her heart. Ailie said nothing, but marvelled how blithely and blindly her sister always set foot on the facile descent that led to her inevitable doom of deprivation and regret.

“The Grand Tour!” said Uncle Dan; “it’s the fitting termination to your daft days, Lennox. Up by at the Castle there’s a chariot with imperials that conveyed the Earl on his, the hammercloth most lamentably faded: I often wonder if his lordship takes a sly seat in it at times when no one’s looking, and climbs the Alps or clatters through Italian towns again when Jones the coachman is away at his tea. It’s a thing I might do myself if I had made the Tour and still had the shandrydan.”

“Won’t you really need me?” Aunt Ailie asked her sister, and half hoped, half feared spring-cleaning should postpone the holiday; but Bell maintained it should be now or never, more particularly as Lennox’s dress was new.

Oh, London, London! siren town! how it bewitched the girl! Its cab-horse bells were fairy; its evening, as they entered, hung with a myriad magic moons and stars. The far-stretching streets with their flaming jewel windows, the temples in the upper dusk, and the solemn squares crowding round country trees; the throngs of people, the odours of fruit-shops, the passion of flowers, the mornings silvery grey, and the multitudinous monuments rimed by years, thunder of hoofs in ways without end, and the silence of mighty parks,—Bud lay awake in the nights to think of them.

Jim Molyneux had the siren by the throat: he loved her, and shook a living out of her hands. At first she had seemed to him too old, too calm, too slow and stately as compared with his own Chicago, nor did she seem to have a place for any stranger: now he had found she could be bullied,—that a loud voice, a bold front, and the aid of a good tailor could compel her to disgorge respect and gold. He had become the manager of a suburban theatre, where oranges were eaten in the stalls, and the play was as often as not “The Father’s Curse”; but once a day he walked past Thespian temples in the city, and, groaning at their mismanagement, planned an early future for himself with classic fronts of marble, and duchesses advertising him each night by standing in rows on the pavement awaiting their carriages. Far along Grove Lane, where he dwelt in a pea-green house with nine French-bean rows and some clumps of bulbs behind, one could distinguish his coming by the smartness of his walk and the gleam of the sunshine on his hat. He had one more secret of success—teetotalism. “Scotch and soda,” he would say, “that’s what ails the boys, and makes ’em sleepier than Hank M’Cabe’s old tom-cat. Good boys, dear boys, they’ve always got the long-lost-brother grip, but they’re mighty prone to dope assuagements for the all-gone feeling in the middle of the day. When they’ve got cobwebs in their little brilliantined belfries, I’m full of the songs of spring and merry old England’s on the lee. See? I don’t even need to grab; all I’ve got to do is to look deserving, and the stuff comes crowding in: it always does to a man who looks like ready-money, and don’t lunch on cocktails and cloves.”

“Jim, boyette,” his wife would say, “I guess you’d better put ice or something on your bump of self-esteem;” but she proudly wore the jewels that were the rewards of his confidence and industry.

Bud and Ailie, when they thought of home in these days, thought of it as a picture only, or as a chapter in a book covered in mouldy leather, with f’s for s’s. In their prayers alone were Dan and Bell real personages; and the far-off little town was no longer a woodcut, but an actual place blown through by the scented airs of forest and sea. Bell wrote them of rains and hails and misty weather; Grove Lane gardens breathed of daffodils, and the city gleamed under a constant sun. They came back to the pea-green house each day from rare adventuring, looking, in the words of Molyneux, as if they were fresh come off the farm, and the best seats in half a dozen theatres were at their disposal. “Too much of the playhouse altogether!” Bell wrote once, remonstrating. “Have you heard that man in the City Temple yet?”

In Molyneux’s own theatre there was a break in the long succession of melodrama and musical comedy. He privately rejoiced that, for two ladies of such taste as Ailie and her niece, he could display a piece of the real legitimate—“King John,”—though Camberwell was not very likely to make a week of Shakespeare very profitable to his treasury. Ailie and Bud were to go on Tuesday; and Bud sat up at night to read an acting copy of “King John” till every character took flesh in her imagination, and the little iron balcony behind the pea-green house became the battlemented walls of Angiers, to whose postern came trumpeters of France.

They sat in the drawing-room, astonished at her speeches—

“You men of Angiers, open wide your gates,
And let young Arthur, Duke of Bretagne, in,
Who by the hand of France this day hath made
Much work for tears in many an English mother.”

Or—

“I am not mad: this hair I tear is mine;
My name is Constance; I was Geffrey’s wife;
Young Arthur is my son, and he is lost!”

“Bravo, Bud!” would Molyneux cry, delighted. “Why, if I was an actor-manager, I’d pay you any salary you had the front to name. Ain’t she just great, Millicent? I tell you, Miss Ailie, she puts the blinkers on Maude Adams, and sends Ellen ’way back in the standing-room only. Girly, all you’ve got to learn is how to move. You mustn’t stand two minutes in the same place on the stage, but cross ’most every cue.”

“I don’t know,” said Bud dubiously. “Why should folk have fidgets on a stage? They don’t always have them in real life. I’d want to stand like a mountain—you know, Auntie Ailie, the old hills at home!—and look so—so—so awful, the audience would shriek if I moved, the same as if I was going to fall on them.”

“Is that how you feel?” asked Jim Molyneux, curiously surveying her.

“Yes; that’s how I feel,” said Bud, “when I’ve got the zip of poetry in me. I feel I’m all made up of burning words and eyes.”

“Child, you are very young!” said Mrs Molyneux.

“Yes,” said Bud; “I suppose that’s it. By-and-by I’ll maybe get to be like other people.”

Jim Molyneux struck the table with his open hand. “By George!” he cried, “I wouldn’t hurry being like other people; that’s what every gol-darned idiot in England’s trying, and you’re right on the spot just now as you stand. That’s straight talk, nothing but! I allow I favour a bit of leg movement on the stage—generally it’s about the only life there is on it; but a woman who can play with her head don’t need to wear out much shoe-leather. Girly—” he stopped a second, then burst out with the question: “How’d you like a little part in this ‘King John’?”

A flame went over the countenance of the girl, and then she grew exceedingly pale. “Oh!” she exclaimed—“Oh! Jim Molyneux, don’t be so cruel.”

“I mean it,” he said, “and I could fix it, for they’ve got an Arthur in the caste who’s ill and bound to break down in a day or two if she had an understudy—and if I— Think you could play a boy’s part? There isn’t much to learn in Arthur, but that little speech of yours in front of Angiers makes me think you could make the part loom out enough to catch the eye of the cognoscenti. You’d let her, wouldn’t you, Miss Ailie? It’d be great fun. She’d learn the lines in an hour or two, and a couple of nights of looking on would put her up to all the business. Now don’t kick, Miss Ailie; say, Miss Ailie, have this little treat with us!”

Ailie’s heart was leaping. Here was the crisis,—she knew it,—what was she to do? She had long anticipated some such hour—had often wrestled with the problem whether, when it came, the world should have her Bud without a struggle for the claims of Bell and the simple cloistered life of the Scottish home. While yet the crisis was in prospect only, she could come to no conclusion. Her own wild hungers as a girl, recalled one night in the light of kitchen candles, had never ceased to plead for freedom,—for freedom and the space that herself had years ago surrendered: now it was the voice of the little elder sister, and the bell of Wanton Wully ringing at evening humble people home.

“Just this once!” pleaded Mr Molyneux, understanding her scruples: Bud’s face mutely pleaded.

Yes, “just this once!”—it was all very well, but Ailie knew the dangers of beginnings. It would not even be, in this case, a beginning; the beginning was years ago—before the mimicry on the first New Year’s morning, before the night of the dozen candles, or the creation of The Macintosh: the child had been carried onward like a feather in a stream.

“I really don’t mind much, myself,” said Ailie at last; “but I fancy her Aunt Bell would scarcely like it.”

“Not if she knew I was going to do it,” said Lennox quickly; “but when the thing was over she’d be as pleased as Punch—at least, she’d laugh the way she did when we told her I was dressed as Grandma Buntain at the ball.”

The sound of Will Oliver’s curfew died low in Ailie’s mind, the countenance of Bell grew dim: she heard, instead, the clear young voice of Bud among the scenery and sat with an enraptured audience. “If you are all so anxious for it, then—” she said, and the deed was done!

She did not rue it when the night of Bud’s performance came, and her niece as the hapless young Bretagne welcomed the Dauphin before the city gates: she gloried in the natural poignancy that marked the painful scene with Hubert come to torture, but she almost rued it when Molyneux, having escorted them in an inexplicable silence home, broke out at last in fervent praise of his discovery as soon as the girl had left them for her bed.

“I’ve kept clutch of myself with considerable difficulty,” he said, “for I didn’t want to spoil girly’s sleep or swell her head, but I want to tell you, Millicent, and you, Miss Ailie, that I’ve Found my Star! Why, say! she’s out of sight! She was the only actor in all that company to-night who didn’t know she was in Camberwell: she was right in the middle of medieval France from start to finish, and when she was picked up dead at the end of the fourth act she was so stone-cold and stiff with thinking it she scared the company. I suspect, Miss Ailie, that you’re going to lose that girl!”