Eileen wondered if he were a Dissenter. But then "the place was full of such people."

"You don't think there's enough religion?" she murmured.

"There's certainly plenty of churches and chapels. But I find myself isolated here. You see, I'm a Socialist."

Eileen crossed herself instinctively.

"You don't believe in God!" she cried in horror. For the good nuns had taught her that "les socialistes" were synonymous with "les athees."

He laughed. "Not, if by God you mean Mammon. I don't believe in Property—we up here in the sun and the others down there in the soot."

"But you are up here," said Eileen, naively.

"I can't help it. My mother would raise Cain." He smiled wistfully. "She couldn't bear to see a stranger helping father in the factory management."

"Then you are down there."

"Quite so. I work as hard as any one even if my labour isn't manual. I dress like an ordinary hand, too, though my mother doesn't know that, for I change at the office."

"But what good does that do?"

"It satisfies my conscience."

"And I suppose the men like it?"

"No, that's the strange part. They don't. And father only laughs. But one must persist. At Oxford I worked under Ruskin."

"Oh, you're an artist!"

"No, I didn't mean that part of Ruskin's work. His gospel of labour—we had a patch for digging."

"What—real spades!"

"Did you imagine we called a spoon a spade?" he said, a whit resentfully.

Eileen smiled. "No, but I can't imagine you using a common or garden spade."

"You are thinking of my hands." He looked at them, not without complacency, Eileen thought, as she herself wondered where he had got his long white fingers from. "But it is a couple of years ago," he explained. "It was hard work, I assure you."

"Did your mother know?" Eileen asked with a little whimsical look.

"Of course not. She would have been horrified."

"Well, but most people would be surprised."

"Yes. Put your muscle into an oar or a cricket bat and you are a hero; put your muscle into a spade and you are a madman."

"You think it's vice versa?" queried Eileen, ingenuously.

"Much more. At least," he stammered and coloured again, "I don't pose as a hero but simply—"

"As what?" Eileen still looked innocent.

"I simply think work is the noblest function of man," he burst forth. "Don't you?"

"I do not," answered Eileen. "Work is a curse. If the serpent had not tempted Eve to break God's commandment, we should still be basking in Paradise."

He looked at her curiously. "You believe that?"

"Isn't it in the Bible?" she answered, seriously astonished.

"Whatever the primitive Semitic allegorist may have thought, work is a blessing, not a curse."

"Then you are an atheist!" Eileen recoiled from this strange young man.

"Ah, you shrink back!" he said in tones of bitter pleasure. "I told you I lived in isolation."

Eileen's humour shot forth candidly. "You'll not be isolated when you die."

His bitterness passed into genial superiority. "You mean I'll go to hell. How can you believe anything so horrible?"

"Why is that horrible for me to believe? For you—" And she filled up the sentence with a smile.

"I don't believe you do believe it."

"There's nothing you seem to believe. I do honestly think that you can't be saved if you don't believe."

"I accept that. The question, however, is what kind of belief and what kind of saving. Do you suppose Plato is in hell?"

"I don't know. He invented Platonic love, didn't he? So that might save him." She looked at him with her great grey eyes—he couldn't tell whether she was quizzing him or not.

"Is that all you know of Plato?"

"I know he was a Greek philosopher. But I only learned Greek roots at the Convent. So Plato is Greek to me."

"He has been beautifully Englished by the Master of my College. I wish you'd read him."

"Is the translation in the library?"

"Of course—with lots of other interesting books, and such queer folios and quartos and first editions. The collector was a man of taste. Why do you never come and let me show them you?"

"You'd run away."

"No, I wouldn't," he smiled encouragingly.

"Yes, you would. And leave your pipe on Plato!"

He laughed. "Was I rude? But I didn't know you then. Come to-morrow afternoon and show you've forgiven me."

The new interest was sufficiently tempting. But her maidenliness held back. "I'll come with your mother."

Disgust lent him wit. "You're her companion—not she yours."

"True. Nor I yours."

"Then I'll come here."

"Bringing the Plato and the folios—?"

"Why not? You can't forbid me my own drawing-room."

"I can run away and leave my crochet-hook behind."

"You'll find me hooked on whenever you return."

"Well, if you're determined—by hook or by crook! But you're not going to convert me to Socialism?"

"I won't promise."

"You must. I don't mind reading Plato."

"He's worse. He isn't a Christian at all."

"I don't mind that. He's B.C. He couldn't help it. But you Socialists came after Christ."

"How do you know Socialism isn't a return to Him?"

"Is it?"

"Aha! You are getting interested.... But I hear my mother coming down to dinner. To be continued in our next. A demain, is it not?"

He held out his shapely white hand, and hastened through the conservatory into the garden.

"Going to dig?" Eileen called after him maliciously.



VIII

Eileen became interested in Robert Maper, for the old books he opened up to her were quite new and enlarging. She had imagined the Church replacing Paganism as light replaced darkness. Now she felt that it was only as gas replaced candle-light. The darkness was less Egyptian than the nuns insinuated. Plato in particular was a veritable chandelier. It occurred to her suddenly that he might be on the black list. But she was afraid to ask her Confessor for fear of hearing her doubt confirmed. To tell the good father of the semi-secret meetings in the library would have been superfluous, since there was nothing to conceal even from Mrs. Maper, though that lady did not happen to know of them. Eileen did not even use the garden door. Besides, there was never a formal appointment, not infrequently, indeed, a disappointment, when the library held nothing but books. Robert Maper merely provided that possibility of an innocent double life, without which existence would have been too savourless for Eileen. Even a single line of railway always appeared dismal to her; she liked the great junctions with their bewildering intertanglements, their possibilities of collision. And now that Lieutenant Doherty had faded away into Afghanistan and silence—he did not even acknowledge the letter announcing her approaching marriage—Robert Maper proved a useful substitute.

One day Mr. Maper senior invited her to drive down with him and go over the factory, and as Mrs. Maper was not averse from impressing her employee by the sight of the other employes, she was permitted to go. Nothing, however, would induce Mrs. Maper to adventure herself in these scenes of her early life, touching which she professed a sovereign ignorance. "Machines are so clattery," she said. "My head wouldn't stand them. I once went to that exhibition in London and I said to myself, never no more for this gal."

"And you never did go any more since you were a girl?" asked the companion, with professional pointedness.

"No, never no more," replied Mrs. Maper, serenely, "once is too often, as the gal said when the black man kissed her."

Eileen laughed dutifully at this quotation from the latest comic opera, and went off, delighted to companion the husband by way of change. He proved quite a new man, too, in his own element, bringing the most complicated machinery to the level of her understanding. Room after room they passed through, department after department full of tireless machinery, and tired men and women, who seemed slaves to the whims of fantastic iron monsters, all legs and arms and wheels. It took a morning to see everything, down to the pasting and drying and packing rooms, and as a last treat Mr. Maper took her to the engine-room, whence he said came the power that turned those myriad wheels, moved those myriad levers, in whatever department they might be and whatever their function. Eileen gazed long at the mighty engine, rapt in reverie. She could scarcely tear herself away, and when at last Mr. Maper brought her into the counting-house, she had forgotten that she must meet his son there. The white-browed clerk in corduroys did not, however, raise his eyes from his ledger, and Eileen was grateful to him for preserving the piquancy of their relation.

She did not find it so piquant, though, in the library next Sunday afternoon when he was clutching at her hand and asking her to be his wife. She awoke as from a dream to the perception of a solemn and grotesque fact.

"Oh, please!" and she tried to tear her hand away.

He clung on desperately. "Eileen—don't say you don't care at all."

"I'm not Eileen, and I particularly dislike you at this moment. Let me have my hand, please."

He dropped it like a stinging nettle. "I was hoping you'd let me keep it," he murmured.

"Why?" She was simple and pitiless. "Because we read Plato together? That was platonic enough, wasn't it?"

"You can jest about what breaks my heart?"

"I am very sorry. I like you."

His breathing changed, "like a fish thrown back into the water," Eileen thought. She hastened to add, "But it's not what a wife should feel."

"How do you know what a wife should feel?"

Eileen screwed up her forehead. "If I felt it, I should know, I suppose."

"No, you mightn't. You've liked to come here and talk to me."

"Because I like books. And you talk like a book."

"That was before I fell in love. I didn't talk like a book just now."

"When you took my hand! More like a book than ever. I've read it all—lots of times."

"Oh, Eil—Miss O'Keeffe—you are very cruel."

Eileen smiled. "I am not—I'm very kind—I threw you back into the water."

He gasped, as though out of it again. "Do you mean I am not grown enough?"

She flushed and improvised on his theme. "Not quite that. You hooked yourself, as you threatened to do. But suppose I had landed you. You know the next step—hot water. What a lot you would have got into, too!"

"You are thinking of my mother?"

"Yes, raising Cain, I think you said once. Oh, dear, swim about and be thankful." And a vision of Mrs. Maper's amazement twitched the corners of her lips and made them more enchanting.

"I'm not so cold-blooded as all that. But if you do throw me back, let it be with the promise to take me again, when I am grown. I don't say it to tempt you, but you know I shall be very rich."

"Indigestible, do you mean?"

"Oh, please let us drop that metaphor! Metaphors can never go on all fours."

"Certainly not when they have fins."

"Don't jest, Eil—Miss O'Keeffe! Let me redeem you from your sordid life."

"Why is it sordid? You said work was divine."

"You can work in a higher sphere."

"And this is the Socialist! I really thought you'd want me to turn factory lass."

"You are laughing at me."

"I am perfectly serious. I won't drag you down from Socialism, and a head-shawl wouldn't become me."

"Why, you'd look sweet in it. Dear, dear, Miss O'Keeffe—"

"Good-by."

"No, you shan't go." He barred her way. Her airiness had given him new hope.

"If you don't behave sensibly, I'll go altogether—give notice."

"Then I'll follow you to your next place."

"No followers allowed. Seriously, I'll leave if you are foolish."

"Very well," he said abruptly. "Let's go on reading Plato," and he turned to the book.

"No, no more Dialogues, in or out of Plato."

She was smiling but stern. He opened the library door and bowed as she passed out.

"Remember," he said. "I will remain foolish for ever."

"You have too long an opinion of yourself," was Eileen's parting flash.



IX

The next evening she sat in the drawing-room before dinner, softly playing an accompaniment to her thoughts. Why didn't she feel anything about Robert Maper except a mild irritation at the destruction of so truly platonic a converse? In a book, of which his proposal savoured, she would have found him quite a romantic person. In the actuality she felt as frigid as if his marble forehead was chilling her, and what she remembered most acutely was his fishlike gasping. Then, too, the contradictoriness of his social attitude, his desire to make her a rich drone, his shame at his mother, his reclusive shyness—all the weaknesses of the man—came to obscure her sense of his literary idealism, if not, indeed, to reveal it as a mere coquetry with fine ideas and coarse clothes. And then for a moment the humour of being Mrs. Maper's daughter-in-law appealed to her, and she laughed to herself in soft duet with the music.

And in the middle of the duet Mrs. Maper herself burst in, with her bodice half hooked and her hair half done.

"What's this I hear, Miss Hirish Himpudence, of your goings-on with my son?"

Eileen swung round on her stool. "I beg your pardon," she said.

"Oh, you can't get out of it by beggin' my pardon, creepin' into the library like a mouse—and it's a nice sly mouse you are, too, but there's never a mouse without its cat—"

"She'd have done better to do your hair and mind her business," said Eileen, calmly.

Mrs. Maper's forefinger shot heavenwards. "It was you as ought to have minded your business. I didn't pay you like a lady and feed you like a duchess to set your cap at your betters. But I told Mr. Maper what 'ud come of it if we let you heat with us, though I didn't dream what a sly little mouse—"

The torrent went on and on. Eileen as in a daze watched the theatric forefinger—now pointed at the floor as if to the mouse-hole, now leaping ceilingwards like the cat,—and her main feeling was professional. She was watching her pupil, storing up in her memory the mispronunciations and vulgarisms for later insinuative improvement. Only a tithe of her was aware of the impertinence. But suddenly she heard herself interrupting quietly.

"I shall not sleep under your roof another night." Mrs. Maper paused so abruptly that her forefinger fell limp. She was not sure she meant to give her companion notice, and have the trouble of training another, and she certainly did not wish to be dismissed instead of dismissing.

"Silly chit!" she said in more conciliatory tones. "And where will you sleep?"

But Eileen now felt she must obey her own voice—the voice of her outraged pride, perhaps even of Brian Boru himself. "Good-by. I'll take some things in a handbag and send for my box in the morning."

Mrs. Maper's hand pointed to the ceiling. "And is that the way you treat a lady—you're no lady, I tell you that. I demand a month's notice or I shall summons you."

At this juncture it occurred to Eileen that this might have been her mother-in-law, and a smile danced into her eyes.

"Himpudent Hirish hussy! Oh, but I'll have the lore of you. Don't forget I'm the wife of a Justice of the Peace."

"Very well; you get Justice, I want Peace." And Eileen fled to her room.

She had hardly begun packing her handbag when she heard the door locked from the outside with a savage snap and a cry of, "I'll learn you who's mistress here, my lady."

Eileen smiled. She was only on the second floor, and captivity revived all her girlish prankishness. She now began to enjoy the whole episode. That she was out of place, out of character, out of lodging even, was nothing beside the humour of this incursion into real life of the melodrama she had mocked at. Was she not the innocent heroine entrapped by the villain? Fortunately, she would not need the hero to rescue her. She went on packing. When her handbag was ready she looked about for means to escape. She opened her windows and studied the drop and the odd bits of helpful rainpipe. Descent was not so easy as she had imagined. Short of tearing the sheets into strips (and that might really bring her within the J.P.'s purview) or of picking the lock (which seemed even more burglarious, not to mention more difficult) she might really remain trapped. However, there would be time to think properly when she had packed her big box. Half an hour passed cheerfully in the folding of dresses to an underplay of planned escapes, and she had just locked the box, when Mrs. Maper's voice pierced the door panel.

"Well, are you ready to come to supper?"

The governess's instinct corrected "dinner." Mrs. Maper when excited was always tripping into this betrayal of auld lang syne, but she preserved a disdainful silence.

"Eileen, why don't you hanser?"

Still silence. The key grated in the lock.

Eileen looked round desperately. The thought of meeting Mrs. Maper again was intolerable. The mirrored door of the rifled wardrobe stood ajar, revealing an enticing emptiness. Snatching up her handbag and her hat, she crept inside and closed the door noiselessly upon herself. "The wardrobe mouse," she thought, smiling.

"Well, my lady!" Mrs. Maper dashed through the door, in her dinner-gown and diamonds, her forefinger hovering, balanced, between earth and heaven. She saw nothing but an answering figure ribboned and jewelled, that dashed at her and pointed its forefinger menacingly.

The appearance of this figure as from behind the glass shut out from her mind the idea of another figure behind it. The packed box, neat and new-labelled, the absence of the handbag and of any sign of occupancy, the open windows, the silence, all told their lying tale.

"The Hirish witch!" she screamed.

She ran from one window to the other seeking for a sign of the escaped or the escapade. She was relieved to find no batter of brains and blood spoiling the green lawn. How had the trick been done? It did not even occur to her to look under the bed, so hypnotised was she by the sense of a flown bird. Eileen almost betrayed herself by giggling, as at the real stage melodrama.

When Mrs. Maper ran downstairs to interrogate the servants—eruption into the kitchen was one of her incurable habits—Eileen slipped through the wide-flung door, down the staircase, and then, seeing the butler ahead, turned sharp off to the little-used part of the corridor and so into the library. She made straight for the iron staircase to the grounds, and came face to face with Robert Maper.

Twilight was not his hour for the library—she saw even through her perturbation that he was pacing it in fond memory. His face lighted up with amazement, as though the dead had come up through a tombstone.

"Good-by!" she said, shifting her handbag to her left hand and holding out her right. Her self-possession pleased her.

"What!" he cried. And again he had the gasp of a fish out of water.

"Yes, I came to say good-by."

"You are leaving us?"

"Yes."

"Oh, and it is I that have driven you away!"

"No, no, don't reproach yourself, please don't. Good-by."

He gasped in silence. She gave a little laugh. "Now that I offer you my hand, it is you who won't take it."

He seized it. "Oh, Eil—Miss O'Keeffe—let me keep it."

"Please! we settled that."

"It will never be settled till you are my wife."

"Listen!" said Eileen, dramatically. "In a few minutes your mother and father will be seated at dinner. Your mother will have told your father I've left the house in disgrace. Don't interrupt. Would you be prepared to walk in upon them with me on your arm and to say, 'Mother, father, Miss O'Keeffe has done me the honour of consenting to be my wife'?"

With her warm hand still in his, how could he hesitate? "Oh, Eileen, if you'd only let me!"

The imagination of the tableau was only less tempting to Eileen. It was procurable—she had only to move her little finger, or rather not to move it. But the very facility of production lessened the tableau's temptingness. The triumph was complete without the vulgar actuality.

"I can't," she said, withdrawing her hand. "But you are a good fellow. Good-by." She moved towards the garden steps. He was incredulous of the utter end. "I shall write to you," he said.

"This is a short cut," she murmured, descending. As her feet touched the grass she smiled. How they had both tried to stop her, mother and son! She hurried through the shrubbery, and by a side gate was out on the old wagon road. More slowly, but still at a good pace, she descended towards the Black Hole, now beginning to twinkle and glimmer with lights, and far less grimy and prosaic than in the crude day.



X

While packing her big box, she had decided to try to lodge that night with a programme-girl she had got to know at the Theatre Royal, and the motive that set her pace was the desire to find her before she had started for the theatre.

The girl usually hovered about Mrs. Maper's box. Once Eileen had asked her why she wasn't in evidence the week before. "Lord, miss," she said, "didn't you recognise me on the stage?"

Eileen thus discovered that the girl sometimes figured as a super, when travelling companies came with sensational pieces, relying upon local talent, hastily drilled, for the crowds. Mary became a Greek slave, or a Billingsgate fishwife, with amusing unexpectedness.

Eileen's next discovery about the girl was that she supported a paralysed mother, though the bed-ridden creature on inspection proved to be more cheerful than the visitors she depressed. Mr. Maper had sent her grapes from his hothouse only a few days before, and in taking them to the little house Eileen had noticed a "Bedroom to Let."

To her relief, when she reached the bleak street, she could see that though the blind was down, the bill was still in the window. Her spirits bubbled up again. Ere she could knock at the door, the programme-girl bounced through it, hatted and cloaked for the theatre.

"Miss O'Keeffe!" She almost staggered backward. Eileen's face worked tragically in the gloom.

"There are villains after me!" Eileen gasped. "Take this bag, it contains the family jewels. That bedroom of yours, it is still to let?"

"Yes, miss."

"I take it for to-night, perhaps for ever. The avenger is on my footsteps. The law may follow me, but I shall defy its myrmidons in my trackless eyrie."

"Oh, Miss O'Keeffe! You frighten me. I shouldn't like to have all these jewels in my house, and with my mother tied to her bed."

Eileen burst into a laugh. "Oh, miss!" she said, mimicking the programme-girl. "Didn't you recognise me on the stage?"

"Mary Murchison!" gasped the programme-girl. "Oh, Miss O'Keeffe, how wonderful! You nearly made my heart stop—"

"I am sorry, but I do want to take your bedroom. I've left Mrs. Maper, and you are not to ask any questions."

"I haven't time, I'm late already. Fortunately, I only come on in the second act."

"That's nice; put my bag in and I'll come to the theatre with you." The thought was impromptu, an evening with a bed-ridden woman was not exhilarating at such a crisis.

"You ought to be an actress yourself," the programme-girl remarked admiringly on the way.

Eileen shuddered. "No, thank you. Scream the same thing night after night—like a parrot with not even one's own words—I should die of monotony."

"Oh, it isn't at all monotonous. It's a different audience every night, and even the laughs come in different places. My parts have mostly been thinking parts—to-night I'm a prince without a word—but still it's fun."

"But how can you bear strange men staring at you?"

"One gets used to it. The first time they put me in tights I blushed all through the piece, but they had painted me so thick it wasn't visible."

"In short, you blushed unseen."

Eileen wished to go to the pit, but her new friend would not hear of her not occupying her habitual box, since she knew that the management would be glad to have it occupied if it were empty. This proved to be the case, and put the seal upon Eileen's enjoyment of the situation. To spend her evening in Mrs. Maper's box was indeed a climax.

She borrowed theatre-paper and scribbled a note to her ex-employer, giving the address for her trunk. An orange and some biscuits sufficed for her dinner.

Not till she was in her little bedroom, surrounded by pious texts, did she break down in tears.



XI

The next morning, as she sat answering advertisements, the programme-girl knocked at the door of the bedroom and announced that Mr. Maper had called.

Eileen turned red. It was too disconcerting. Would he never take "no" for an answer? "I won't see him. I can't see him," she cried.

The girl departed and returned. "Oh, Miss O'Keeffe, he begs so for only one word."

"The word is 'no.'"

"After he's been so kind as to bring your box down!"

"Oh, has he? Then the word is 'thanks.'"

"Please, miss, would you mind giving it to him yourself?"

"Who's Irish, you or I? I won't speak to him at all, I tell you."

"But I don't like to send him away like that, when he's been so kind to mother."

"When has he been kind to your mother?"

"Those grapes you brought—"

"That was old Mr. Maper."

"So is this."

"Oh!" Eileen was quite taken aback, for once. "All right, I'll go into the parlour."

He was infinitely courteous and apologetic. He had been very anxious about her. Why had she been so unkind as to leave, and without ever a good-by to him?

"Oh, hasn't your wife told you, then?"

"She has told me you were rude, and that you left without notice, and she wants me to prosecute you. I suppose you lost your temper. You found her rather difficult."

"I found her impossible," said Eileen, frigidly.

"Yes, yes, I understand." He was flushed and unhappy. "You found her impossible to live with?"

Eileen nodded; she would have added "or to make a lady of," but he looked so purple and agitated that she charitably forbore. She was wondering whether Mrs. Maper could really have been so mean as to omit her share in the quarrel, but he went on eagerly:—

"Quite so, quite so. And what do you think it has been for me?"

She murmured inarticulate sympathy.

"Ah, if you only knew! Oh, my dear Miss O'Keeffe, while you've been in the house, it's been like heaven."

"I'm glad I've given satisfaction," she said drily.

"Then what do you give by going? I assure you the day you came to the works it was like heaven there too."

"You forget the temperature," Eileen smiled. "However, it was a very nice day, and I thank you. But I can't come back after—"

"Who asks you to come back?" he broke in. "No, I should be sorry to see you again in a menial position, you with your divine gifts of beauty and song. The idea of your getting a new place," he added with a fall into prose, "makes me feel sick."

"I value your sympathy, but it is misplaced," she replied freezingly.

"Sympathy! It isn't sympathy! It's jealousy. Oh, my dear Miss O'Keeffe!" He seized her limp hand. "Eileen! Let me help you—"

As the true significance of his visit, and of the purple agitation, dawned upon her, the grim humour of the position overbore every other feeling. Her hand still in his, she began to laugh, and no biting of her lips could do more than change the laugh into an undignified snigger. Instead of profiting by his grip of her, he dropped her hand suddenly as if a hose had been turned on his passion, and this surrender of her hand reduced Eileen to a passable gravity.

"I'm very sorry, Mr. Maper. But really, life is too horribly amusing."

"I'm very sorry it's me that affords you amusement," he said stiffly.

"No, it isn't you at all, it's just the whole thing. You've been most kind all along. And I dare say you mean to be kind now. But I don't really need any help. Your wife's threats of prosecution are ridiculous, she made my longer stay impossible. I could more justly claim a month's notice from her."

"That's what I thought. I've brought you a month's salary." He fumbled in his pocket-book.

"Don't trouble. I shall not accept it."

"You shall," he said sternly. "Or I'll prosecute you."

Eileen's laugh rang out clear. This time he laughed too.

"Now, don't you call life amusing?" she said. "Here am I to take a cheque under penalty of having to pay it."

"Well, which shall it be?"

"Such a cheque is charming." And she held out her hand. He put the cheque in it and shook both warmly. They parted, the best of friends.

"Come to me for a character, of course," he said.

"Don't you come to me," replied Eileen, with a roguish smile.



XII

Eileen's next place was—as if by contrast—with a much more genteel family, and a much poorer, though it flew higher socially. It lived in a house, half in a fashionable London terrace, half in a shabby side street, and its abode was typical of its ambitions and its means. Mrs. Lee Carter drew the line clearly between herself and her governess, which was a blessing, for it meant Eileen's total exclusion from her social life, and Eileen's consequent enjoyment of her own evenings at home or abroad, as she wished. This unusual freedom compensated for the hard work of teaching children in various stages of growth and ignorance how to talk French and play the piano. Her salary was small, for Mrs. Lee Carter's ambition to live beyond her neighbours' means was only achieved by pinching whomever she could. She was not bad-hearted; she simply could not afford anything but luxuries. Eileen wondered at not being asked sometimes to perform at her parties, till she found that only celebrities ever did anything in that house.

This was a period of much mental activity in Eileen's life. The tossing ocean of London life, the theatres that played Shakespeare, the world of new books and new thought, her recent perusal of Plato and of man, all produced fermentation. But every night she knelt by her bedside and said her "Ave Maria" with a voluptuous sense of spiritual peace, and every morning she woke with a certain joy in existence and a certain surprise to find herself again existing. Her old convent-thought recurred. "We are worked from without—marionettes who can watch their own performance. And it is very amusing." Once she read of a British action in Afghanistan against border-tribes, and she wondered if Lieutenant Doherty was in the fighting. Since she had ceased to be his mother-confessor he had become very shadowy; his image now rose substantial from the newspaper lines, and she was surprised to find in herself a little palpitation at his probable perils. "One's heartstrings, too, are pulled," she thought. "I don't like it. Marionettes should move, not feel." These reflections, however, came to her more often anent her family, and the struggles of her kin for a livelihood touched her more deeply than any love. "We are like bits of the same shattered body," she thought. "In these cold English families everybody is another body." She sent most of her salary to Ireland, and her pocket-money came from singing in the choir on Sunday.

The bass chorister was a very amusing man. His voice was sepulchral but his conversation skittish. Eileen's repartees smote him to almost the only serious respect of his life, and one day he said: "Why, there's a future in you. Why don't you go on the stage?"

"What nonsense!" But the blood was secretly stirred in her veins. She saw herself walking along the Black Hole with the programme-girl, but her point of view had been modified since she had received a similar suggestion with a shudder. If she could play Rosalind to a great London audience, the staring men-folk would matter little.

"Why not?" went on the bass tempter. "A humour like yours with such a voice and such a face!"

"The stage is full of better voices and better faces."

"No, indeed. Why, there isn't a girl at the Half-and-Half—" He stopped and almost blushed.

She smiled. "Oh, I don't mind your going to such places. What is the Half-and-Half, a place where they drink beer?"

"Oh, it's just our slang name for a little music-hall that's just between the East End and the West End, with a corresponding programme."

"Our slang name?"

"Well—" he paused. "If you'll keep it very dark—but of course you will—I appear there myself."

"You! What do you do?"

"I sing patriotic songs and drinking-songs—"

"Aren't they the same thing in England?"

"Don't say that on the stage or they'll throw pewter pots. They're very patriotic."

"That's just what I said. What's your name—I suppose you change it?"

"Yes—as I hope you will yours—some day."

"I shan't take yours."

"Nobody arxed you, miss," he said. "And, besides, mine is copyright—Jolly Jack Jenkins. I make a fiver a week by it."

"A fiver!" The bass chorister suddenly took on an air of Arabian nights. At this rate she could buy back the family castle. Her struggling brothers—how they would bless their magician sister—Mick should have a London practice, Miles a partnership in an engineering firm.

"You come with me and see Fossy," continued Jolly Jack Jenkins.

Eileen declined with thanks. It took a week of Sundays to argue away her objections—religious, moral, and social. To play Rosalind to fashionable London was one thing: to appear at a variety theatre or low-class music-hall, which nobody in her world or Mrs. Lee Carter's had ever heard of, was another pair of shoes. Yet strange to say, it was the last consideration that decided her to try. Even if admitted to the boards, she could make her failure in secure obscurity. It would simply be another girlish escapade, and she was ripe for mischief after her long sobriety.

"But even your Mr. Fossy mustn't know my real name or address," she stipulated.

"Who shall I say you are?"

"Nelly O'Neill."

"Ripping. Flows from the tongue like music."

"Then it's rippling you mean."

"What a tongue! Wait till Fossy sees you."

"Will he ask me to stick it out?"

"Oh, Lord, I wish I had your repartee. But I'm thinking—Nelly O'Neill—doesn't it give you away a bit?"

"Keeps me a bit, too. I shouldn't like to lose myself altogether—gain reputation for another woman."

Fossy proved to be a gentleman named Josephs, who in a tiny triangular room near the stage of the Half-and-Half listened critically to her comic singing, shook his head and said he would let her know. Eileen left the room with leaden heart and feet.

"Wait for me a moment, please," Jolly Jack Jenkins called after her, and she hung about timidly, jostled by dirty attendants and painted performers. She was reading a warning to artistes that any improper songs or lines would lead to their instant dismissal, and regretting more than ever her incompetence for this innocent profession, when she heard the bass chorister's big breathing behind her.

"Bravo! You knocked him all of a heap."

"Rubbish! Don't try to cheer me."

"You!" Jolly Jack Jenkins opened his eyes. "You taken in by Fossy! He'll suggest your doing a trial turn next Saturday night when the public are least critical, you'll make a furore, and he'll offer you two guineas a week."

"A pleasing picture, but quite visionary. Why, he didn't even ask for an address to write to!"

"Oh, I dare say he thought care of me would find you. No, don't glower at me—I don't mean anything wrong."

"I hope you didn't let him misunderstand—"

"You asked me not to let him know too much. Fossy has to do so much with queer folk—"

"Yes, I saw he had to warn them against improper songs."

Jolly Jack Jenkins exploded in a guffaw.

"I'm sorry I came," said Eileen, in vague distress.

"Fossy isn't," he retorted. "He was clean bowled over. In that Irish fox-hunting song all the gallery will be shouting 'Tally-ho!' Where did you pick it up?"

"I didn't pick it up, I made it up for the occasion."

"By Jove! I have to pay a guinea to a bloodsucking composer when I want a song. Oh, Fossy's spotted a winner this time."

"Why is he called Fossy?"

"I don't know. Nobody knows. I found the name, I pass it on."

"Perhaps it's a corruption of Foxy."

"There! I never thought of that! You are a—!"

The jolly chorister's mouth remained open. But the prophecy that had already issued from it came true in every detail.



XIII

Despite her private stage-fright, Nelly O'Neill, the new serio-comic, made a big hit. Her innocent roguery was captivating; her virginal freshness floated over the footlights, like a spring breeze through the smoky Hall.

"Well, you are an all-round success," cried Jolly Jack Jenkins, pumping her hand off at the wings, amid a thunder of applause, encores, and whistles.

"You mean a Half-and-Half!" laughed Nelly through Eileen's tears. She had given herself to the audience, but how it had given itself in return, flashing back to her in electric waves its monstrous vitality, its apparently single life.

The Half-and-Half was one of those early Victorian halls of the people, with fixed stars and only a few meteors. The popular favourites changed their songs and their clothes at periodic intervals, but they would have lost favour if they had not remained the same throughout everything. A chairman with a hammer announced the turns, and condescendingly took champagne with anybody who paid for it. Eileen soon became an indispensable part of this smoky world. She signed an agreement at three guineas a week for three years, to perform only at the Half-and-Half. Fossy saw far. Eileen did not. She jumped for joy when she got beyond eyeshot. She felt herself jumping out of the governess-life. Second thoughts and soberer footsteps brought doubt. She had intended telling Mrs. Lee Carter as soon as the trial-performance was over, but now she hesitated and was lost. Half the charm lay in the secret adventure, the dare-devilry. Besides, as a governess she had a comfortable home and a respectable status, and she had already seen and divined enough of the world behind the footlights to shrink from being absorbed into it. What fun in the double life! She had never found a single life worth living. She would belong to two worlds—be literally Half-and-Half. Nelly O'Neill must only be born at twilight. But she felt she could not be out uniformly every evening without some explanation.

"Mrs. Lee Carter," she said, "I have to tell you of a peculiar chance of augmenting my income that has come to me."

Mrs. Lee Carter, wearing plumes and train for a court reception, paled. "You are not going to leave me!"

The naive exclamation strengthened Eileen's hand.

"I don't quite see how to do otherwise," she said boldly.

"Oh, dear, I wish I could afford more. I know you're worth it."

Eileen thought, "If you'd only give your guests good claret instead of bad champagne!" But she said, "You are very kind—you have always been most considerate."

The plumes wagged.

"I try to please all parties."

Nelly O'Neill thought, "And to give too many." Eileen said, "Yes, you've given me my evenings to myself as it is, and considering the new work is only in the evenings, I did think of running the two, but I'm afraid—"

"If we lightened your work a little—" interrupted Mrs. Lee Carter, eagerly.

"I shouldn't so much ask that as to have perfect freedom like a young man—a latch-key even." Never had Eileen looked more demure and Puritan.

"Oh, I hope you won't be working too late—"

"The people who go there are engaged in the daytime. I'd better be frank with you; it's an extremely unfashionable place towards the East End, and I quite understand you may not like me to take it. At the same time I shall never meet anybody who knows me. In fact, it's a dancing and singing place."

"Oh!" said Mrs. Lee Carter, blankly. "I didn't know you could teach dancing, too."

"You never asked me.... Of course, if you prefer it, I could come here as a day governess and leave after tea.... You see it's a longish journey home: I'm bound to be late...."

"What's the difference? Come and go as you please.... Of course, you won't mind using the back door when there's a party ... the servants...."

For the deception Eileen at first salved her conscience Irish-wise by sending every farthing to her mother under the deceiving pretext of rich private pupils. She would not even deduct for cabs. Sometimes she could not get an omnibus, but she almost preferred to walk till she was footsore, for both riding and walking were forms of penance. The stuffy omnibus interior after the smoky Hall was nauseating, and in those days no lady thought of climbing the steep ladder to the slanting roof. But it sometimes happened that a crawling cabman coming westward would invite her to a free ride, and Eileen would accept gratefully, and, moreover, gain from conversations with her drivers new material for her songs.

This period of her life was almost as amusing as she had anticipated; her only depressions came from the children of the footlights, and the necessity of adjusting herself superficially to her environment, under pain of unpopularity. Her isolation and the privacy of her home-life already made sufficiently for that. And to be disliked even by those she disliked Eileen disliked. Her nature needed to wallow in warm admiration. She got plenty.

When, fifteen months later, she agreed to pay Fossy a hundred pounds for modifying her contract so as to enable her to appear at other Halls, she said with a smile, "You deserve it. You are the only man at the Half-and-Half who hasn't made love to me."

Fossy grinned. "If I had known that, I should have demanded a larger compensation."

Even the bass chorister had not been able to resist proposing, though his grief at being refused was short-lived, for he died soon after by a fall from one of those giant wheels that were the saurians of the modern cycle. Eileen shed many a tear over Jolly Jack Jenkins.

With the growth of her popularity before and behind the footlights came heavier calls upon her geniality, and, like a hostess who tries to pay off her debts in one social lump sum, Eileen got "a Sunday out," and Nelly gave a lunch at a riverside hotel to a motley company of popular favourites. It was expensive; for the profession, even in those days, expected champagne. It was appallingly protracted; for the party, having no work to do that evening, showed no disposition to break up, and brandies-and-sodas succeeded one another in an aroma of masculine cigars and feminine cigarettes. It was noisy and hilarious, and gradually it became rowdy. The Singing Sisters sang, but not in duet. The Lion Comique, whose loyal melodies were on every barrel-organ, argued Republicanism and flourished that day's copy of Reynolds's Newspaper, The Beauteous Bessie Bilhook—"the Queen of Serio-Comics" was scandalously autobiographic, and the old plantation songster—looking unreal with his washed face—was with difficulty dissuaded from displaying his ability to dance on the table without smashing anything. The climax was reserved for the demure one-legged gymnast, who suddenly produced a pistol and discharged it in the air. When the panic subsided, he explained to the landlord and the company that he was "paying his shot."

"That's a hint for me to discharge the bill," said Nelly, adroitly, and, thanking everybody effusively for the happiness afforded her, she hurried home to Oxbridge Terrace, to wash it all away in nursery tea. The young Lee Carters made a restful spectacle with their shining innocent faces, and she almost wished they would never grow up.

As her success grew, offers from the pantomimes and even the legitimate stage began to reach her. But now she would not make the step. At the Halls she was her own mistress, able to arrange at her own convenience with orchestras. Even Rosalind would have meant long rehearsals and a complex interference with her governess-life.

At the theatres, too, to judge by all she heard, a sordid side of the profession was accentuated. The players played for their own hands, and even the greatest did not disdain to "queer" the effects of their subordinates, whenever such effects did not heighten their own. Hamlet had been known to be jealous of the ghost, and the success of his sepulchral bass. It was in fact a world of jostling jealousies, as hidden from the public as the prompter. In the Halls she was her own company and her own playwright and her own composer. She had her elbows free.

And even here Bessie Bilhook, whose vanity was a byword in Lower Bohemia, and who had arrogantly assumed the sovereignty of the Serio-Comics, refused to appear on the same programmes unless her name was printed twice as large as Nelly O'Neill's, and was further displayed on a board outside, alone in its nine-inch glory. Again, actresses were recognised by the newspapers; the Halls had as yet no status. Their performers were not so photographed; indeed, Eileen refused to sit. She desired this obscurer form of celebrity. If her fame should ever reach Mrs. Lee Carter, the game would be nearly up. Her poor mother might even suffer the shock of it; perhaps the professional future of her brothers would be injured. Her sedate life had grown as dear as her noisy life, she loved the transition to the innocent home circle.

Yet in this very domesticity lay a danger. It provoked her to an ever broader humour on the stage. She let herself go, like a swimmer emboldened by a boat behind. Eileen O'Keeffe she felt would rescue Nelly O'Neill if licence carried her too near the falls. It was so irresistibly seductive, this swift response of the audience to the wink of suggestion. Like a vast lyre, the Hall vibrated to the faintest breath of roguishness. Almost in contemptuous mockery one was tempted to experiment....

One day, in a sudden horror of herself, she pleaded illness and hurried back to her mother for a holiday.



XIV

The straggling village looked much the same, the same pigs and turkeys rooted and strutted, the same stinging turf-smoke came from the doors and windows (save from one or two cabins unroofed by the Castle tyrant), the same weeds grew in the potato-patches, the same old men in patched brogues pulled their caubeens from their heads and their dudeens from their mouths, as she went past, half-consciously studying the humours for stage reproduction. It was hard for her to remember she wasn't "the Quality" in London, or that the Half-and-Half existed simultaneously with these beloved woods and waters. In only one particular was the village changed. Golf links had been discovered near it, a club-house had sprung up and the peasants found themselves enriched by the employment of their gossoons as caddies. The O'Keeffes were prospering equally—thanks to her subsidies—although she hadn't yet bought them back their castle. "All's for the best in the greenest of isles," she told herself, as she sat basking in family affection.

And yet the wave of melancholia refused to ebb. Indeed, it swelled and grew blacker. The remedy seemed to intensify the disease; a holiday but gave her time to possess her soul, and brood upon its stains, her childhood's scene but enabled her to measure the realities of her achievement against the visions of girlhood. Life seemed too hopeless, too absurd. To amuse the gross adult, to instruct the innocent child—what did it all mean to her own life? She was tired of doing, she wanted to be something; something for herself. She was always observing, imitating, caricaturing, but what was she? A nothing, a phantasm, an emptiness.

"Eileen avourneen," said her mother, suddenly. "I wish you were married."

Eileen opened her eyes. "Dear heart, is this another offer from the castle?" And she laughed gently.

Mrs. O'Keeffe's fingers played uneasily with her bosom's cross. "No, but I should feel happier about you. It—it settles people."

"It certainly does," Eileen laughed, and her celebrated ditty, "The Marriage Settlement," flashed upon her. "Oh, dear," and her laugh changed to a sigh. "The marriages I see around me!"

"What! Isn't Mrs. Lee Carter happy?"

Eileen flushed. "I shouldn't like to be in her shoes," she said evasively.

"Officers seem to make the best husbands," said Mrs. O'Keeffe.

"Because they are so much away?" queried Eileen, with a vague memory of her Lieutenant Doherty.

That night the melancholia was heavy as a nightmare, without the partial unconsciousness of sleep. This blackness must be "the horrors" she had heard women of her stage-world speak of. She wanted to spring out of bed, to run to her mother's room. But that would have meant hysteric confession, so she bit her lips and stuck her nails into the sheet. Perhaps suicide would be simplest. She was nothing; it would not even be blowing out a light. No, she was something, she was a retailer of gross humours, a vile sinner; it might be kindling more than a light, an eternal flame. "Child of Mary," indeed! She deserved to be strangled with her white ribbon. And she exaggerated everything with that morbid mendacity of the confessional.

Two days later she went for a walk along the springy turf of the valley. The sun shone overhead, but from her spirit the mist had not quite lifted. Suddenly a small white ball came scudding towards her feet. She looked round and saw herself amid little flags sticking in the ground. Distant voices came to her ear.

"This must be the new game that's creeping in from Scotland," she thought. "Perhaps I ought to have a song ready if ever it catches on. Ah, here comes one of the young fools—I'll watch him—"

He came, clothed as in a grey skin that showed the beautiful modelling of his limbs. His face glowed.

"Ouida's Apollo," she thought, but in the very mockery she trembled, struck as by a lightning shaft. The blackness was sucked up into fire and light. "Am I in the way?" she said with her most bewitching smile.

He raised his hat. "I was afraid you might have been struck."

"Perhaps I was," she could not help saying.

"Oh, gracious, are you hurt?" His voice was instantly caressing.

"Do I look an object for ambulances?"

He smiled dazzlingly. "You look awfully jolly." Later Eileen remembered how she had taken this reply for a line of poetry.

A week later the Hon. Reginald Winsor, younger brother of an English Earl, was teaching Eileen golf.

It had been a week of ecstasy.

She thought of Reginald the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning and dreamed of him all night.

Now she knew what her life had lacked—to be caught up into another's personality, to lose one's petty individuality in—in what? Surely not in a larger; she couldn't be so blind as that. In what then? Ah, yes, in Nature. He was gloriously elemental. He wasn't himself. He was the masculine. Yes, that was the correlative element her being needed. The mere manliness of his pipe made its aroma in his clothes adorable. Or was it his big simplicity, in which she could bury all her torturing complexity? Oh, to nestle in it and be at rest. Yet she held him at arm's length. When they shook hands her nerves thrilled, but she was the colder outwardly for very fear of herself.

On the ninth day he proposed.

Eileen knew it would be that day. Lying in bed that morning, she found herself caught by her old impersonal whimsy. "I'm a fever, and on the ninth day of me the man comes out in a rash proposal." Ah, but this time she was in a tertian, too. What a difference from those other proposals—proper or improper. Her mind ran over half a dozen, with a touch of pity she had not felt at the time. Poor Bob Maper, poor Jolly Jack Jenkins, if it was like this they felt! But was it her fault? No man could say she had led him on—except, perhaps, the Hon. Reginald, and towards him her intentions were honourable, she told herself smiling. But the jest carried itself farther and more stingingly. Could he make an "honourable" she told herself her? Ah, God, was she worthy of him, of his simple manhood? And would he continue proposing, if she told him she was Nelly O'Neill? And what of his noble relatives? No, no, she must not run risks. She was only Eileen O'Keeffe, she had never left Ireland save for the Convent. The rest was a nightmare. How glad she was that nobody knew!

The proposal duly took place in a bunker, while Eileen was whimsically vituperating her ball. The fascination of her virginal diablerie was like a force compelling the victim to seize her in his arms after the fashion of the primitive bridegroom. However the poor Honourable refrained, said boldly, "Try it with this," and under pretence of changing her golfsticks possessed himself of her hand. For the first time his touch left her apathetic.

"Now it is coming," she thought, and suddenly froze to a spectator of the marionette show. As the Hon. Reginald went through his performance, she felt with a shudder of horror over what brink she had nearly stepped. The man was merely a magnificent animal! She, with her heart, her soul, her brain, mated to that! Like a convict chained to a log. Not worthy of him forsooth! "There's a gulf between us," she thought, "and I nearly fell down it." And the Half-and-Half rose before her, clamouring, pungent, deliciously seductive.

"Dear Mr. Winsor," she listened with no less interest to her own part in the marionette performance, "it's really too bad of you. Just as I was getting on so nicely, too!"

"Is that all you feel about—about our friendship?"

"All? Didn't you undertake to teach me golf? I haven't the faintest desire not to go on ... as soon as we have escaped from this wretched bunker. Come! Did you say the niblick?"

Reginald's manners were too good to permit him to swear, even at golf.

"One's body is like an Irish mud-cabin," Eileen reflected. "It shelters both a soul and a pig."



XV

Nelly O'Neill threw herself into her work with greater ardour than ever. But her triumphs were shadowed by worries. She was nervous lest the Hon. Reginald should turn up at one of her Halls—she had three now; she was afraid her voice was spoiling in the smoky atmosphere; sometimes the image of the Hon. Reginald came back reproachfully, sometimes tantalisingly. Oh, why was he so stupid? Or was it she who had been stupid?

Then there was the apprehension of the end of her career at the Lee Carters'. The young generation was nearly grown up. The eldest boy she even suspected of music-halls. He might stumble upon her.

Her popularity, too, was beginning to frighten her. Adventurous young gentlemen followed her in cabs—cabs were now a necessity of her triple appearance—and she never dared drive quite to her door or even the street. Bracelets she always returned, if the address was given; flowers she sent to hospitals, anonymous gifts to her family. Nobody ever saw her wearing his badge.

A sketch of her even found its way to one of Mrs. Lee Carter's journals.

"Why, she looks something like me!" Eileen said boldly.

"You flatter yourself," said Mrs. Lee Carter. "You're both Irish, that's all. But I don't see why these music-hall minxes should be pictured in respectable household papers."

"Some people say that the only real talent is now to be found in the Halls," said Eileen.

"Well, I hope it'll stay there," rejoined her mistress, tartly. Eileen recalled this conversation a few nights later, when she met Master Harold Lee Carter outside the door at midnight with a rival latch-key.

"Been to a theatre, Miss O'Keeffe?" asked her whilom pupil.

"No; have you?"

"Well, not exactly a theatre!"

"Why, what do you mean?"

"Sort of half-and-half place, you know."

By the icy chill at her heart at his innocent phrase, she knew how she dreaded discovery and clung to her social status.

"What is a half-and-half place?" she asked smiling.

"Oh, comic songs and tumblers and you can smoke."

"No? You're not really allowed to smoke in a theatre?"

"Yes, we are. They call it a music-hall—it's great fun. But don't tell the mater."

"You naughty boy!"

"I don't see it. All the chaps go."

She shook her head. "Not the nicest."

"Oh, that's tommyrot," he said disrespectfully. "Their women folk don't know—that's all."

Eileen now began to feel like a criminal round whom the toils thicken. In the most fashionable of her three Halls, she sang a little French song. And she had taught Master Harold his French.

Of course, even if Nelly were seen by Eileen's friends or acquaintances, detection was not sure. Eileen was always in such sedate gowns, never low-cut, her manners were so suppressed, her hair done so differently, and what a difference hair made! In fact, it was in her private life that she felt herself more truly the actress. On the boards her real secret self seemed to flash forth, full of verve, dash, roguery, devilry. Should she take to a wig, or to character songs in appropriate costumes? No, she would run the risk. It gave more spice to life. Every evening now was an adventure, nay three adventures, and when she snuggled herself up at midnight in her demure white bed, overlooked by the crucifix, she felt like the hunted were-wolf, safely back in human shape. And she became more audacious, letting herself go, so as to widen the chasm between Nelly and Eileen, and make anybody who should suspect her be sure he was wrong. And occasionally she paid for all this fever and gaiety by fits of the blackest melancholy.

She had gradually dropped her habit of prayer, but in one of her dark moods she found herself slipping to her knees and crying: "Oh, Holy Mother, look down on Thy distressed daughter, and deliver her from the body of this death. So many wooers and no spark of love in herself; a woman who sings love-songs with lips no man has touched, a lone-of-soul who can live neither with the respectable nor with the Bohemians, who loves you, sanctissima Maria, without being sure you exist. Oh, Holy Mother of God, advocate of sinners, pray for me. If I had only something solid to cling to—a babe to suckle with its red grotesque little face. You will say cling to the cross, but is not my whole life also a crucifixion? I am rent in twain that a thousand fools may laugh nightly. Oh, Holy Mother, make me at one with myself; it is the atonement I need. Send me the child's heart, and I will light a hundred candles to you.... Or do you now prefer electricity? Oh, Maria mavourneen, I cannot pray to you, for there is a mocking devil within me, and you will not cast her out." And she burst into hysteric tears.



XVI

As she was about to start one evening for her round, Mrs. Lee Carter's maid brought up a bombshell. Superficially it looked like a letter with foreign stamps, marked "Private" and readdressed with an English stamp from Ireland. But that one line of unerased writing, her name, threw her into heats and colds, for she remembered the long-forgotten hand of Lieutenant Doherty. She had to sit down on her bed and finish trembling before she broke the seal and set free this voice from the past.

"DEAR MOTHER-CONFESSOR,—You will be wondering why I have been silent all these years and why I write now. Well, I will tell you the truth. It wasn't that I believed you had really gone into the Convent you wrote me you were joining, it was the new and exciting life and duties that opened up before me when I got to Afghanistan, far from post-offices. Afterwards I was drafted to India and had a lot of skirmishing and tiger-shooting, and your image—forgive me!—became faint, and I excused myself for not writing by making myself believe you were buried in the Convent. ["So, after all, he never got the letter telling him I was going to marry back the Castle!" Eileen mused joyfully through her agitation.] But now that I am at last coming home in a few months, no longer a minor, but nearer a major (that's like one of your old jokes)—somehow your face seems to be the only thing I am coming back for. It's no use trying to explain it all, or even apologising. It's just like that. I've confessed, you see, though it is hopeless to get straight with my arrears, so I won't attempt it. And when I found out how I felt, of course came the horrible thought that you might be in the Convent after all, or, worse still, married and done for, so what do you think I did? I just sent this cable to your mother: 'Is Eileen free? Reply paid. Colonel Doherty.' Wasn't it clever and economical of me to think of the word 'free,' meaning such a lot—not married, not a nun, not even engaged to another fellow? Imagine my joy when I got back the monosyllable, meaning all that lot. I instantly cabled back 'Thanks, don't tell her of this.' ["So that's what mother was hinting at," thought Eileen, with a smile.] It was all I could do not to cable to you: 'Will you marry me? Reply paid.' ["What a good idea for a song!" murmured Nelly.] Put me out of my agony as soon as you can, won't you, dearest Eileen? Your face is floating before me as I write, with its black Irish eyes and its roguish dimples...."

She could read no more. She sat long on her bed, dazed by the rush of bitter-sweet memories. The Convent, her father, her early years, this dear boy ... all was washed together in tears. There was something so bizarre, unexpected and ingenuous about it all; it touched the elemental in her. If he had excused himself even, she would have tossed him off impatiently. But his frank exposure of his own self-contradictoriness appealed subtly to her. Was this the want in her life, was it for him she had been yearning, below the surface of her consciousness, even as she had remained below the surface of his? Here, indeed, was salvation—providential salvation. A hand was stretched to save her—snatch her from spiritual destruction. The dear brown manly hand that had potted tigers while she had been gesticulating on platforms—a performing lioness. Distance, imagination, early memories, united to weave a glamour round him. It was many minutes before she could read the postscript: "I think it right to say that my complexion is not yellow nor my liver destroyed. I know this is how we are represented on your stage. I have sat for a photograph, especially to send you."

The stage! Why should he just stumble upon the word, to chill her with the awful question whether she would have to tell him. She was late at her engagements, her performance was perfunctory—she was no longer with "the boys," but seated in a howdah on an elephant's back, side by side with a mighty hunter, or walking with a tall flaxen-haired lieutenant between the honeysuckled hedges of an Irish boreen. It struck her as almost miraculous—though it was probably only because her attention was now drawn to the name—that she read of Colonel Doherty in the evening paper the gasman tendered her that very evening, as she waited at the wing. It was a little biography full of deeds of derringdo. "My Bayard!" she murmured, and her eyes filled with tears.

She wrote and tore up many replies. The first commenced: "What a strange way of proposing! You begin by giving me two black eyes to prove you've forgotten me. I am so different in other people's eyes as well as in my own it would be unfair to accept you. You are in love with a shadow." The word-play about her eyes seemed to savour of the "Half-and-Half." She struck it out. But "you are in love with a shadow," remained the Leit-motif of all the letters. And if he was grasping at a shadow it would be unfair for her to grasp at the substance.

The correspondence continued by every Indian mail after his receipt of her guarded refusal; he Quixotic, devoted, no matter how she had changed. He loved the mere scent of her letter paper. Was she only a governess? Had she been a charwoman, he would have kissed her cheeks white. The boyish extravagance of his passion worked upon her, troubling her to her sincerest core. She would hide nothing from him. She wrote a full account of her stage career, morbidly exaggerating the vulgarity of her performance and the degradation of her character. She was blacker than any charwoman, she said with grim humour. The moment she dropped the letter into the box, a trembling seized on all her limbs. She spent three days of torture; her fear of losing him seeming to have heightened her love for him.

Then Mrs. Lee Carter handed her a cable.

"Sailing unexpectedly S.S. Colombo to-morrow—Doherty." She nearly fell fainting in dual joy. He was coming home, and he would cross her letter. Before it could return they would be safely married. It should be destroyed unread.

"Is anything wrong?" said her mistress.

"No, quite the contrary."

"I am glad, because I had rather unpleasant news to tell you. But you must have seen that when Kenneth goes to Winchester, there will practically be nothing for you to do."

"How lucky! For I am going to be married."

"Oh, my dear, I am so glad," gushed Mrs. Lee Carter.

Afterwards Eileen marvelled at the obvious finger of Providence unravelling her problems. She had never relished the idea of finding another place, not easily would she find one so dovetailing into her second life; she might have been tempted to burn her boats.

She prepared now to burn her ships instead. Her contracts with the Halls were now only monthly; Nelly O'Neill could easily slip out of existence. She would not say she was going to be married—that would concentrate attention on herself. Illness seemed the best excuse. For the one week after the Colombo's arrival she could send conscience money. The Saturday it was due found her still starred; she did not believe his ship would get in till late, and managers would particularly dislike being done out of her Saturday night turn. Perhaps she ought to have left the previous week, she thought. It was foolish to rush things so close. But it was not so easy to give up the habits of years, and activity allayed the fever of waiting. She had sent an ardent letter to meet the ship at Southampton, saying he was to call at the Lee Carters' in Oxbridge Terrace on Sunday afternoon, which she had to herself. Being only a poor governess, she would be unable to meet him at the station or receive him at the house on Saturday night, even if he got in so early. He must be resigned to her situation, she added jestingly. On the Saturday afternoon she received a wire full of their own hieroglyphic love-words, grumbling but obeying. How could he live till Sunday afternoon? Why hadn't she resigned her situation?

As she was starting for the Halls for the last time, in the dusk of a Spring day, a special messenger put into her hand a letter he had scribbled in the train. He was in London then. Her heart thumped with a medley of emotions as she tore open the letter:

"Oh, my darling, I shall see you at last face to face—" But she had no time to spend under the hall-light reading it. In her cab she struck a match and read another scrap. "But, oh, cruel one, not to let me come to-night!" She winced. That gave her a pause. If she had let him come—to the Half-and-Half! He would turn from her, shuddering. And was it not precisely to the Half-and-Half that honour should have invited him? The Half-and-Half arrived at the cab window ere she had finished pondering. She thrust the letter into her pocket.



XVII

Would she ever get through her three Halls? It did not seem as if she had strength for the Half-and-Half itself. She nerved herself to the task, and knew, not merely from the shrieks of delight, that she had surpassed herself. Happy and flushed she flung herself into her waiting cab.

She had the 9.45 turn at her second and most fashionable Hall—a Hall where the chairman had been replaced by programme numbers—and then would come her third and last appearance at 10.35. It was strange to think that in another hour Nelly O'Neill's career would be over. It seemed like murdering her. Yes, Eileen O'Keeffe would be her murderess. Well, why not murder what lay between one and happiness? As she waited at the wings, just before going on, while the orchestra played her opening bars, she glanced diagonally at the packed stalls, and her heart stood still. There in the second row sat Colonel Doherty, smoking a big cheroot. Instinctively she made the sign of the cross; then swayed back and was caught by the man who changed the programme-numbers.

"Is No. 9 come?" she gasped.

"I think so; aren't you well, Miss O'Neill?"

"For God's sake, give me breathing space," she said, with a last wild peep at the Colonel. Yes, there was no mistaking him after the three new portraits he had sent her. He was in cheerful conversation with a stout, sallow gentleman of the Anglo-Indian stage-type. Both were in immaculate evening-dress and wore white orchids. How fortunate she had refused to send any photograph in return, pleading ugliness but really afraid of theatrical sketches that might find their way to the officers' mess!

The band stopped, changed its tune, No. 9 appeared on the board; there was a murmur of confusion.

"No, by Heaven, I'll face the music," she said with grim humour. She almost hustled the hastening juggler out of the way. She was in a whirlwind of excitement. So he was there—well, so much the better. He had saved her from lying. He had given her an easy way of confessing. Words were so inadequate, he should see the reality: the stage to-night would be her confessional. She would extenuate nothing. She would throw herself furiously into the fun and racket; go to her broadest limits, else the confession would be inadequate. Then ... if he survived the shock ... why then, perhaps, she'd insist on going on with this double life...! He had risen in his seat. No, no, he must not go away, she could not risk the juggler boring him.

"I'm better; I mustn't be late at my next shop," she murmured apologetically as the number and the music were changed back.

"Ah, she's come—she was late," came the murmurs of the audience as it stirred in excited expectation.

She flung on roguish, feverish, diabolical, seductive in low-cut bodice pranked with flowers. It was a frenzy of impromptu extravagance, dazzling even the orchestra; each line accentuated by new gesture, the verses supplemented by new monologue; a miracle of chic and improvisation, and the house rose at it. Out of the mist before her eyes thunder seemed to come in great roars and crashes. She almost groped her way to the wing.

She was recalled. The mist cleared. She bowed direct at him, smiling defiance from her sparkling eyes. He was applauding with his hands, his stick, his lungs! Was it possible?—yes, he had not recognised her!

Now came a new revulsion. Again she felt herself saved. She sang her other songs straight at him, and exaggerated them equally, half to tempt Providence, half as a bold way of keeping Eileen still concealed. She heard his companion chuckling, "By Jove, Willie, she's mashed on you," as she threw a farewell kiss towards him. Then she hurried to her dressing-room and took out his letter. She had transferred it to the pocket of her theatrical gown, but had not as yet found time to finish it. Even before she re-perused it, another emotion had begun to possess her, a rush of resentment. So this was how he amused himself while waiting to clasp her in his arms! How would he ever live through the hours till Sunday afternoon, forsooth! She was jealous of the applause he lavished on Nelly O'Neill, incensed at his levity, at his immaculate evening-dress, at his white orchid. How dare he be so gay and debonair? Her anger rose as she read his protestations, his romantic professions. "O my darling, I shall sit up all night, thinking of you, re-reading all your dear letters, recalling our past, picturing our future. In short, as old Landor puts it:—

"'A night of memories and of sighs I consecrate to thee.'"

She crumpled the paper in her hand. There was a knock at the door; Fossy poked his head in. He had risen in the world of Halls, even as Nelly O'Neill.

"Might I present two friends of mine? They want so much to know you."

"You know I never see anybody, and that I have to hurry off."

"Then, I was to give you this bouquet."

He handed in a costly floral mass. Amid it lay a card, "Colonel Doherty." She crumpled his letter more viciously.

"Tell them I can give them ten minutes only. Oh, Fossy, it's an amusing Show, isn't it?"

"It was a rattling good show," said Fossy, half puzzled. "Come in, boys."

Entered the Anglo-Indian twain with shining faces and shirt-fronts, cheroots politely lowered.

"Oh, smoke away, gentlemen," cried Nelly O'Neill, facing them in all the dazzle of her flesh and the crudity of her stage-paint, and her over-lustrous eyes, "don't mind me. Which of you is the Colonel?"

The stout, sallow gentleman jocosely pushed his tall flaxen-haired companion forward. "Oh, I knew the Major was out of it," he grinned.

"Not at all, Major," said Nelly. "I only wanted to know which I had to thank for these lovely flowers."

"You have yourself to thank," said the Colonel, smartly. "By Jove! You gave us a treat. London was worth coming back to."

"Ah, you've been away from London?"

"Just back this very day from India—"

"And of course the first thing after a good dinner is the good old Friv—" put in the Major.

"Thank you, Major," said Fossy. "That's handsome of you. And now I'll leave you to Miss O'Neill."

"That's handsomer still," said the Colonel. And the three men guffawed. Eileen felt sick.

The Major began to talk of the music-halls of India; the Colonel chimed in. They treated her as a comrade, told her anecdotes of the coulisses of Calcutta. The Colonel retailed a jest of the bazaars.

"I permit smoke, not smoking-room stories," she said severely. At which the twain poked each other shriekingly in the ribs. After that Eileen let the Colonel have rope enough to hang himself with, though she felt it cutting cruelly into her own flesh. It was an orgie of the eternal masculine, spiced with the aroma of costly cigars.

"I'm so sorry," she said, when she had let them have a quarter of an hour's run. "I really must fly." And she seized the bouquet, and carefully adjusted his card in the glowing mass. "Won't you come and have tea with me to-morrow? About four."

The Colonel winced. "I fear I have another appointment."

"Oh, rot! I'll bring him," said the Major. "Where do you hang out?"

"22 Oxbridge,"—her hesitation was barely perceptible—"Crescent."

The Colonel started. "Do you know it, Colonel?" She looked at him ingenuously.

"No, but how odd! My other appointment is at 22 Oxbridge Terrace."

"How funny!" laughed Eileen. "Just round the corner. Then you'll be able to kill two ladies with one cab." And she fled from the Major's cachinnation.



XVIII

She had missed her turn at the third Hall, but she did not care. She went on and gave a spiritless performance. It fell dead, but she cared less. Her head throbbed with a dozen possibilities. She was still undiscovered. As she sat resting on her couch ere resuming her work-a-day gown, her nerves stretched to snapping point, and old Irish songs crooning themselves irrelevantly in her brain, a telegram was handed her.

"He has found out," she thought, going hot and cold. She tore open the pink envelope... and burst into a shriek of laughter. The dresser rushed in, wondering. Nelly O'Neill merely held her sides, jollity embodied. "Oh, the Show, the Show!" she gasped, the tears streaking her painted cheeks.

The telegram that hung between her fingers in two sheets ran: "Reply prepaid. I don't know the ways of the stage so I send you this as a sure way of reaching you to ask when and where I may have the pleasure of calling upon your friend, Miss O'Keeffe, and renewing the study of Plato.—Robert Maper, Hotel Belgravia."

"Any answer, miss?" said the imperturbable doorkeeper.

The answer flashed irresistibly into her mind as he spoke. Oh, she would play up to Bob Maper. Doubtless he imagined her fallen to the level of her metier, though he wasn't insulting. She scribbled hastily: "Robert Maper, Hotel Belgravia. I am waiting at the Hall for you. Come and take me to supper.—EILEEN O'NEILL." She gave instructions he was to be admitted. Then she relapsed into her hysteric amusement. "Oh, the merry master of marionettes, the night my love comes from beyond the seas, you send me to supper with Robert Maper." She waited with impatience. Now that the long-dreaded discovery had come, she was consumed with curiosity as to its effect upon the discoverer. At last she remembered to wash off the rouge and the messes necessary for stage-perspective. Her winsome face came back to her in the mirror, angelic by contrast, and while she was looking wonderingly at this mystic flashing mask of hers, there was a knock, and in another instant she was looking into the eyes burning unchanged under the white marble mantel-piece.

"Ah, there you are!" she said gaily, and shook his hand as though they had met the evening before. "Where shall we go?"

He accepted the situation. "I don't know—I thought you would know."

"I don't—I never supped with a man in my life."

He flushed with complex pleasure and surprise. "Really! Oh, Eileen!"

"Hush! Call me Nelly, if you must be Christian. I suppose you think you may, now."

"I—I beg your pardon," he stammered, disconcerted.

"Don't look so gaspy—poor little thing! It shall be thrown back into the water. Will you carry my bouquet?"

"With pleasure." He grasped it eagerly, and carried it towards the stage door and a hansom.

"It wanted only that," she said. "Oh, the Show, the Show!"

"I don't understand you."

"Do I understand myself?" They got into the hansom. "Where shall we go?" she repeated.

"Places all close at twelve on Saturday night."

"Ah, do they? Your hotel also?"

"No, of course one may eat at one's own hotel. If you don't mind going there—"

"If you don't mind, rather."

"I? Who is my censor?"

"Ah, the word admits I'm discreditable. Never mind, Bob. See how Christian I am."

"No, no, I've felt it was all my doing. Indirectly I drove you to it—oh, how you have weighed on me!"

"Really, I'd quite forgotten you."

He winced and gasped. "Hotel Belgravia," he called up through the trap-door.

"Very strange you should find me," she said, as they glided through the flashing London night.

"Not in the least. I knew you blindfold, so to speak. You forget how I used to stand outside the drawing-room, listening to your singing."

"Eavesdropper!" she murmured. But he struck a tender chord—all the tender chords of her twilight playing that now rose up softly and floated around her.

"Eavesdropper if you like, who heard nothing that was not beautiful. And so I hadn't to look for you. As a matter of fact, I wasn't looking but consulting my programme to know who number eleven was, when you began to sing."

"If you had looked you wouldn't have recognised me," she said, smiling.

"Probably not. The stage get-up would have blurred my memories."

She began to like him again: the oddness of it all was appealing. "Nevertheless," she said, "it is strange you should just find me to-night, for I—"

"No, it isn't," he interrupted eagerly. "I've been every night this week."

"Ah, eavesdropping again," she said, touched.

"I wanted to be absolutely sure—and then I couldn't pluck up courage to write to you."

"But you did to-night?"

"You looked so tired—I felt I wanted to protect you."

A sob came into her throat, but she managed to say coldly, "Was I very bad?"

"To one who had seen you the other nights," he said with complimentary candour.

She laughed. "How is your mother?"

"Oh, she's very well, thank you. She lives in London now."

"Then your father has retired from—"

"He is dead,—didn't you hear?"

"No." Eileen sat in shocked silence. "I am sorry," she murmured at length. But underneath this mild shock she was conscious—as they rolled on without speaking—of a new ease that had come into her life: some immense relaxation of tension. "A hunted criminal must breathe more calmly when he is caught," she thought.



XIX

"Lucky I'm in evening dress," she said, loosening her cloak as they went through a corridor, shimmering with dresses and diamonds, to a crowded supper-room.

"But you're always in evening dress, surely."

"I might have been in tights." And she had a malicious self-wounding pleasure in watching him gasp. She hurried into a revelation of her exact position, as soon as they had secured a just-vacated little table in a window niche. She omitted only Colonel Doherty.

He listened breathlessly. "And nobody knows you are Eileen O'Keeffe, I mean Nelly O'Neill?"

She laughed. "You see you don't know which I am."

"It's incredible."

"So much the worse for your theories of credibility. The longer I live, the less the Show surprises me."

"What show?"

"Oh, it's too long to explain. Say Vanity Fair." Her thumb fell into its old habit of flicking the table. There was a silence.

"I am sorry you told me," he said slowly.

"Why?"

A waiter loomed over them.

"Supper, Sir Robert?"

She glanced quickly at her companion.

"Yes," he said. "Ma buonissima! I leave it to you. And champagne."

"Prestissimo, Sir Robert." He smirked himself off.

"Why does he call you that?" she asked.

"Oh, didn't you know my poor father was made a Baronet, after we entertained Royalty?"

"No; how strange your lives should have been going on all the time!" The pop of a cork at her elbow startled her. Then she lifted her frothing glass. "Sir—to you!"

He clinked his against it. "To the lady of my dreams."

"Still?" She sipped the wine: her eyes sparkled.

"Yes; I've still a long opinion of myself."

She put out her hand quickly and pressed his an instant.

"Thank you!" he said huskily. "That was why I said I was sorry to know that to the world you were still a governess. Of course I was glad, too."

"I don't understand. I always said you were more Irish than I."

"I was glad you had kept yourself unspotted from the stage-world."

"Good God! You call that unspotted! What are men made of?"

"You were in a bad atmosphere. Your lips caught phrases."

"Nonsense. I'm a crow, not a parrot; a thoroughly sooty bird."

"It was your whiteness that attracted—your morning freshness. You don't know what vulgarity is."

"You don't know what I am."

"I know you to your delicious finger-tips. And that's why I am sorry you told me so much. I wanted to ask Nelly O'Neill to marry me. Now she'll think I'm only asking Eileen O'Keeffe, the daughter of the Irish gentleman."

Her eyes filled with tears. "No, they both believe you capable of any folly. Besides, somebody would find out Nelly all the same." And a smile made a rainbow across her tears.

The arrival of the soup relaxed the tension of emotion. In mid-plate she suddenly put down her spoon and laughed softly.

"What is it?" he said, not without alarm at her transitions.

"Why, it would be one of those stock theatrical marriages, into which we entrap titles! Fascinated by a Serio-Comic, poor silly young man. She played her cards well, that Nelly. Ha! ha! ha! Who would dream of Plato's dialogues? And you talk of incredible!"

"I am content to be called silly." He tried to take her hand.

"Well, don't be it in public. You will rank with Lord Tippleton who married Bessie Bilhook, and made a Lady of her—the only ladyhood she's ever known."

"No, I can't rank with him," he smiled back. "I'm only a Baronet."

"It sounds the same. Lady Maper!" she murmured. "But, oh, how funny! There'd be two Lady Mapers."

"My mother would be the Dowager Lady—"

"That's funnier still."

He ate in silence. Eileen mused on the picture of the Dowager, her forefinger to heaven.

"The Royalty—how did that go off?" she said, as he carved the chicken.

"With fireworks. For the reception father built a new house and furnished it with old furniture. Royalty stopped an hour and a quarter. Oh, she was wonderful. I mean my mother. Copied your phrases—see what an impression you made."