The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes

As the end of her conventual period drew nigh Eileen resolved never to go back to the spotted world, but to ask her father to pay her dowry as Bride to the Church, and she had just placed in Marcelle's niche the letter informing Lieutenant Doherty of her call to the higher life (and pointing out how apter than ever his confessions would now be) when Marcelle's signal warned her to look in her own niche. There she found a letter which she could not read till bread-and-chocolate time, but which then took the flavour out of these refreshments. Her lover—he leaped to that verbal position in her thought in this moment of crisis—was ordered off in haste to Afghanistan. The geographical proficiency which had won her so many marks served her only too well, but she hastened to extract her atlas from the fatal niche, and to pore over her geographical misery. She felt she ought to withdraw her own letter for revision, but she could not get at Marcelle or even make her understand. In her perturbation she gave Cabul and Candahar as Kings of Navarre, and Marcelle, implacable as a pillar-box, went away in the evening like a mail-cart.

But the very same night the Superior handed Eileen an opened cablegram which banished Lieutenant Doherty much farther than Afghanistan. Her father was very ill, and called her to his bedside. Things had a way of happening simultaneously to Eileen, these coincidences dogged her life, so that she came to think of them as the rival threads of her life getting tangled at certain points and then going off separately again. After all, if you have several strings to your life, she told herself, it would be more improbable that they should always remain separate than that they should sometimes intertwine.

Eileen reached the Castle through a tossing avenue of villagers, weeping and blessing, and divined from their torment of sympathy that "his honour" was already in his grave. Poor feckless father, how she had loved him spite all his rollicking ways, or perhaps because of them. Through her tears she saw him counting—on his entry into Paradise—the children who had preceded him, and more than ever fuzzled by the flapping of their wings. Oh, poor dearest, how unhomely it would all be to him, this other world where his jovial laugh would shock the nun-like spirits, where there was no more claret, cold, mulled, or buttered, and no sound of horn or tally-ho.

Perhaps it was as well that so many of his brood had gone before him, for with his departure the Castle fell metaphorically about the ears of the survivors. Creditors gave quarter no longer, and Mrs. O'Keeffe found herself reduced to a modest red-gabled farmhouse, with nothing saved from the crash save that part of her dowry which was invested in trustees for the education of her boys. There was no question of Eileen returning to the Convent as a pupil: her desire to take the veil failed at the thought that now she could only be a dowerless working-sister, not a teacher. And for teaching, especially music-teaching, she felt she had a real gift. By a natural transition arose the idea of becoming a music-teacher or a governess outside a Convent, and since her stay at home only helped to diminish her mother's resources, she resolved to augment them by leaving her. Family pride forbade the neighbourhood witnessing a deeper decline. The O'Keeffes were still "the Quality"; it would be better to seek her fortunes outside Ireland and retain her prestige at home. The dual existence would give relish and variety.

Eileen's mind worked so quickly that she communicated these ideas to her mother, ere that patient lady had quite realised that never more would she say, "It's your wife I am, Bagenal dear."

"No, no, you are not to be going away," cried Mrs. O'Keeffe, in alarm.

"Why wouldn't I?" asked Eileen.

Mrs. O'Keeffe could not tell, but looked mysterious meanings. This excited Eileen, so that the poor woman had no rest till she answered plainly, "Because, mavourneen, it's married you are going to be, please the saints."

"Married! Me!"

"It was your father's dying wish, God keep his soul."

"But to whom?"

"You should be asking the priest how good he is. Didn't you notice that the chapel is being white-washed afresh and how clear the Angelus bell rings? Not that it matters much to him, for he has lashings of money as well as a heart of gold."

"Hasn't he a name, too?"

"Don't jump down my throat, Eileen darling. I shouldn't be thinking of O'Flanagan if your father—"

"O'Flanagan! Do you mean the man that bought our Castle at the auction?"

"And isn't it beautifully repaired he's having it for you? He saw you when you were home for the holidays, and he asked us for your hand, all so humble, but your father told him he must wait till you came home for good."

"O'Flanagan!" Eileen flicked him away with her thumb. "A half-mounted gentleman like that."

"Eileen aroon, beggars can't be choosers."

Eileen flushed all over her body. "No more can beggars on horseback."

"Your father will be sorry you take it like that, mavourneen." And the stout saint burst into tears.

Eileen winced. She could almost have flung her arms round her mother and promised to think of it. Suddenly she remembered Lieutenant Doherty. How dared they tear her away from the man she loved! They had not even consulted her. She flicked her thumb agitatedly on the back of her mother's chair. Let her weep! Did they want to sell her, to exchange her for a castle, as if she were a chess-piece? The thought made her smile again.

Her mother said no more, but she could not have employed a more convincing eloquence. The reticence wrought upon Eileen's nerves. After a couple of months of maternal meekness and family poverty, the suggested sacrifice began to appeal to her. A letter from Doherty on his steamer (forwarded to her from Paris by Marcelle), passionately protesting against her intention to take the vows, came to remind her that sacrifice was what she yearned for. The coming of the letter was providential, she told herself: if Marcelle had not posted hers against her will, she might not have had this monition. To return to the Castle as a bride, martyred for the family redemption, was really only a way of returning to the Convent. It meant a life of penance for the good of others. To think of her mother sunning herself again upon the battlemented terrace, or sleeping—if only as guest—in the great panelled bedroom, brought a lump to her throat; her poor tenantry, too, should bless her name; she would glide among them like a spirit, very sad, yet with such healing in her smile and in her touch. "Sure the misthress is the swatest angel God iver sint, so she is." At home she would sit and spin in the old tapestried room, her own life as faded, and sometimes she would dream in the hall, among the antlers and beast-skins, and watch the great burning logs, so much more poetic than this peat smoke which hurt one's eyes. Ah, but then there was O'Flanagan. Well, he would not be much in the way. He liked riding over his new estate in his buckskin breeches, cracking his great loaded whip. She had met him herself once or twice, and the great shy creature had blushed furiously and ridden off down the first bridle-path. "I turn his horse's head as well as his," she had thought with a smile. Yes, she must sacrifice herself. How strange that the nuns should imagine you only renounced by giving up earthly life. Why, earthly life might be the most celestial renunciation of all. But Lieutenant Doherty, what of him? Had she the right to sacrifice him, too? But then she had never given him any claim upon her—she had been merely his little mother-confessor. If he had dared to love her—as his passionate protest against the veil seemed to suggest—it was at his own risk. Poor Doherty, how grieved he would be in far Afghanistan. He would probably rush upon the assegais and die, murmuring her name. Her eyes filled with delicious tears. She sat down and scribbled him a letter hastily, announcing her impending marriage, and posted it at once, so as to put herself beyond temptation to draw back. Then she dashed to her mother's room and sobbed out, "Dear heart, I consent to be martyred."

"What?" said Mrs. O'Keeffe, opening her eyes.

"I consent to be married," Eileen corrected hastily.

"Do you mean to Mr. O'Flanagan?" Mrs. O'Keeffe's face became red as the sun in mist. The cross heaved convulsively on her black silk bosom.

"To whom else? You haven't forgotten he wanted to marry me."

"No, but he has, I am fearing."

"What?" It was now Eileen's turn to open her eyes, and the tears dried on her lashes as she listened. Mrs. O'Keeffe explained, amid the ebb and flow of burning blood, that she had waited in vain for Mr. O'Flanagan to renew his proposal. At first she thought he was waiting for a decent interval to elapse, or for the Castle to be ready for his bride, but gradually she had become convinced by his silence and by the way he avoided her eye when they met and turned his horse down the nearest boreen, that Eileen had been right in calling him half-mounted. He had proposed when he imagined the Squire's fortunes were as of yore, but now he feared he would have to support the ruined family. Well, he needn't fear. The family wouldn't touch him with a forty-foot pole.

"If only your poor father had been alive," wound up Mrs. O'Keeffe, "the dirty upstart would never have dared to put such an insult on his orphaned daughter, that he wouldn't, and if Dan O'Leary should hear of it—which the saints forbid—it's not the jig that his foot would be teaching Mr. O' Flanagan."

The bathos of this anti-climax to martyrdom was too grotesque. Eileen burst into a peal of laughter, which was taken by her mother as a tribute to her lively vituperation. Decidedly, life was deliciously odd. Suddenly she remembered her posted letter to Doherty, and she laughed louder.

Should she send another on its heels? No, it would be rather difficult to explain. Besides, it would be so interesting to see how he replied.

Holly Hall—Eileen's first place—was in the English midlands, towards the North: a sombre stone house looking down on a small manufacturing town, whose very grass seemed dingied with coal-dust. "A dromedary town," Eileen dubbed it; for it consisted of a long level with two humps, standing in a bleak desert. On one of the humps she found herself perched. Below—between the humps—lay the town proper, with its savour of grime and gain. The Black Hole was Eileen's name for this quarter; and indeed you might leave your hump, bathed in sunlight, dusty but still sunlight, and as you came down the old wagon-road you would plunge deeper and deeper into the yellowish fog which the poor townspeople mistook for daylight. The streets of the Black Hole bristled with public-houses, banks, factories, and dissenting chapels. The population was given over to dogs and football, and medical men abounded. Arches, blank walls, and hoardings were flamboyant with ugly stage-beauties, melodramatic tableaux, and the advertisements of tailors. After the Irish glens and the Convent garden the Black Hole was not exhilarating.

Mr. Maper, the proprietor of Holly Hall, was a mill-owner, a big-boned, kindly man, who derived his Catholicism from an Irish mother, and had therefore been pleased to find an Irish girl among the candidates for the post of companion to his wife.

As he drove her from the station up the steep old wagon-road he explained the situation, in more than one sense. Eileen's girlish intuition helped his lame sentences over the stiles. Briefly, she was to polish the quondam mill-hand, whom he had married when he, too, was a factory operative, but who had not been able to rise with him. He was an alderman and a J.P. That made things difficult enough. But how if he became Mayor? An alderman has no necessary feminine, not even alderwoman, but Mayor makes Mayoress. And a Mayoress is not safe from the visits of royalty itself. Of course the Mayoress was not to suspect she was being refined; "made a Lady Mayoress," as Eileen put it to herself.

She entered with a light heart upon a task she soon found heavy. For the mistress of Holly Hall had no sense of imperfections. She was a tall and still good-looking person, and this added to her fatal complacency. Eileen saw that she imagined God made the woman and money the lady, and that between a female in a Paris bonnet and a female in a head-shawl there was a natural gap as between a crested cockatoo and a hedge-sparrow. Mrs. Maper indeed suffered badly from swelled self, for it had subconsciously expanded with its surroundings. The wide rooms of the Hall were her spacious skirts, bedecked with the long glitter of the glass-houses; her head reached the roof and wore the weathercock as a feather in her bonnet. All those whirring engines in the misty valley below were her demon-slaves, and the chimneys puffed up incense at her. When she drove out, her life-blood coursed pleasurably through the ramping, glossy horses.

Mrs. Maper, in short, saw herself an empress. It was simply impossible for her to realise that there were eyes which could still see the head-shawl, not the crown. Her one touch of dignity was grotesque—it consisted of extending her arm like a stiff sceptre, in moments of emphasis, and literally pointing her remarks with her forefinger. Sometimes she pointed to the ceiling, sometimes to the carpet, sometimes to the walls. This digital punctuation appeared to be not only superfluous but irrelevant, for Heaven might be invoked from the floor.

With this bejewelled lady Eileen passed her days either on the Hump, or in the Black Hole, or in the environs, and but for her sense of humour and her power of leading a second life above or below her first, her tenure of the post would have been short. The most delicate repetitions of mispronounced words, the subtlest substitution of society phrases for factory idioms, fell blunted against an impenetrable ignorance and self-sufficiency. Short of dropping the pose of companion and boldly rapping a pupil on the knuckles, there seemed to her no way of modifying her mistress. "Who can refine what Fortune has gilded?" she asked herself in humorous despair. The appearance of Mr. Maper at dinner brought little relief. It was a strange meal in the lordly dining room—three covers laid at one end of the long mahogany table, under the painted stare of somebody else's ancestors. Eileen's girlish enjoyment of the prodigal fare was spoiled by her furtive watch on the hostess's fork. Nor did the alderman contribute ease, for he was on pins lest the governess should reveal her true mission, and on needles lest his wife should reveal her true depths. Likewise he worried Eileen to drink his choicest wines. Vintages that she felt her father would have poised on his tongue in mystic clucking ecstasy stood untasted in a regiment of little glasses at her elbow.

She repaid them, however, by adroit educational remarks.

"How stupid of me again!" she said once. "I held out my hock glass for the champagne! Do tell me again which is which, dear Mrs. Maper."

"I suppose you never had a drink of champagne in your life afore you come here," said Mrs. Maper, beamingly. And she indicated the port glass.

"No, no, Lucy, don't play pranks on a stranger," her husband put in tactfully. "It's this glass, Miss O'Keeffe."

"Oh, thank you!" Eileen gushed. "And this is what? Sherry?"

"No, port," replied Mr. Maper, scarcely able to repress a wink.

"You'll have to tell me again to-morrow night," said Eileen, enjoying her own comedy powers. "My poor father tried to teach me the difference between bird's-eye and shag, but I could never remember."

"Ah, Bob's the boy for teaching you that," guffawed the mill owner. "I stick to half-crown cigars myself." His wife shot him a dignified rebuke, as though he were forgetting his station in undue familiarity.

Afterwards Eileen wondered who Bob was, but at the moment she could think of nothing but the farcical complications arising from the idea of Mrs. Maper's providing Mr. Maper with a male companion secretly to improve his manners. Of course the two companions would fall in love with each other.

After dinner things usually woke up a little, for Eileen was made to play and even sing from the scores of "Madame Angot" and other recent comic operas—a form of music that had not hitherto come her way, though it was the only form the music-racks held to feed the grand piano with. Not till the worthy couple had retired, could she permit herself her old Irish airs, or the sonatas and sacred pieces of the Convent.

Accident—the key to all great inventions—supplied Eileen with a new way of educating her mistress. The cook had been impertinent, Mrs. Maper complained. "Why don't you hunt her?" Eileen replied. Mrs. Maper corrected the Irishism by saying, "Do you mean dismiss?" Eileen hastened to accuse herself of Irish imperfections, and henceforward begged to learn the correct phrases or pronunciations. Sometimes she ventured apologetically to wonder if the Irish way was not more approved of the dictionary. Then they would wander into the library in the apparently unoccupied wing, and consult dictionary after dictionary till Eileen hoped Mrs. Maper's brain had received an indelible impression.

One Sunday afternoon a friendly orthoepical difference of this nature arose even as Mrs. Maper sat in her palatial drawing room waiting for callers, and they repaired to the library, Mrs. Maper arguing the point with loud good humour. A glass door giving by corkscrew iron steps on the garden, banged hurriedly as they made their chattering entry. The rows of books—that had gone with the Hall like the family portraits—stretched silently away, but amid the smell of leather and learning, Eileen's lively nostrils detected the whiff of the weed, and sure enough on the top of a stepladder reposed a plain briar pipe beside an unclosed Greek folio.

"The scent is hot," she thought, touching the still warm bowl. "Bob seems as scared as a rabbit and as learned as an owl." Suddenly she had difficulty in repressing a laugh. What if Bob were the corresponding male companion!

"I see Mr. Robert has forgotten his pipe," she said audaciously.

Mrs. Maper was taken aback. "The—the boy is shy," she stammered.

What! Was there a son lying perdu in the house all this while? What fun! A son who did not even go to church or to his mother's receptions. But how had he managed to escape her? And why did nobody speak of him? Ah, of course, he was a cripple, or facially disfigured, morbidly dreading society, living among his books. She had read of such things. Poor young man!

After dinner she found herself examining the family album inquisitively, but beyond a big-browed and quite undistorted baby nursing a kitten, there did not seem anything remotely potential, and she smiled at herself as she thought of the difficulty of evolving bibs into briar pipes and developing Greek folios out of kittens.

From Mrs. Maper's keenness about the University Boat Race as it drew near, and from her wearing on the day itself a dark blue gown trimmed profusely with ribbons of the same hue, Eileen divined that Bob was an Oxford man. This gave the invisible deformed a new touch of interest, but long ere this Eileen had found a much larger interest—the theatre.

She had never been to the play, and the Theatre Royal of the Black Hole was the scene of her induction into this enchantment. In those days the touring company system had not developed to its present complexity, and the theatre had been closed during the first month or so of Eileen's residence in Dromedary Town. But at length, to Mrs. Maper's delight, a company arrived with a melodrama, and as part of her duties, Eileen, no less excited over the new experience (which her Confessor had permitted her), drove with her mistress behind a pair of spanking steeds to the Wednesday matinee. Mrs. Maper alleged her inability to leave her homekeeping husband as the cause of her daylight playgoing, but Eileen maliciously ascribed it to the pomp of the open carriage.

They occupied a box and Eileen was glad they did. For instead of undergoing the illusion of the drama, she found it killingly comic as soon as she understood that it was serious. It was all she could do to hide her amusement from her entranced companion, and somehow this box at the theatre reminded her of the Convent room in which she used to sit listening to the pious readings anent infant prodigies. One afternoon it came upon her that here Mrs. Maper had learned her strange pump handle gestures. Here it was that ladies worked arms up and down and pointed denunciatory forefingers, albeit the direction had more reference to the sentiment.

It was not till a comic opera came along that Eileen was able to take the theatre seriously. Then she found some of the melodies of the drawing room scores wedded to life and diverting action, sometimes even to poetic dancing; the first gleam of poetry the stage gave her. When these airs were lively, Mrs. Maper's feet beat time and Eileen lived in the fear that she would arise and prance in her box. It was an effervescence of joyous life—the factory girl recrudescent—and Eileen's hand would lie lightly on Mrs. Maper's shoulder, feeling like a lid over a kettle about to boil.

When they came home Eileen would gratify her mistress by imitations of comedians. Presently she ventured on the tragedians, without being seen through. She even raised her arm towards the ceiling or shot it towards the centre of the carpet pattern, and Mrs. Maper followed it spellbound.

But from all these monkey tricks she found relief in her real music. When she crooned the old Irish songs, the Black Hole was washed away as by the soft Irish rain, and the bogs stretched golden with furze-blossom and silver with fluffy fairy cotton, and at the doors of the straggling cabins overhung by the cloud-shadowed mountains, blue-cloaked women sat spinning, and her eyes filled with tears as though the peat smoke had got into them.

In such a mood she was playing one Saturday evening in the interval before dinner, when she became aware that somebody was listening, and turning her head, she saw through the Irish mist a man's figure standing in the conservatory. The figure was vanishing when she cried out a whit huskily, "Oh, pray, don't let me drive you away."

He stood still. "If I am not interrupting your music," he murmured.

"Not at all," she said, breaking it off altogether.

As the mist cleared she had a vivid impression of a tall, fair young man against a background of palms. "Eyes burning under a white marble mantel-piece," she summed up his face. Could this uncrippled, rather good-looking person be Bob?

"Won't you come in, Mr. Robert?" she said riskily.

"I only wished to thank you," he said, sliding a step or two into the room.

"There is nothing to thank me for," she said, whirling her stool to face him. "It's my way of amusing myself." She was glad she was in her evening frock.

"Amusing yourself!" He looked aghast.

"What else? I am alone—I have nothing better in the world to do."

"Does it amuse you?" He was flushed now, even the marble mantel-piece ruddied by the flame. "I wish it amused me."

Now it was Eileen's turn to gasp. "Then why do you listen?"

"I don't listen—I bury myself as far away as I can."

"So I have understood. Then what are you thanking me for?"

"For what you are doing for—." his hesitation was barely perceptible—"my mother."

"Oh!" Eileen looked blank. "I thought you meant for my music."

His face showed vast relief. "Oh, you were talking of your music! Of course, of course, how stupid of me! That is what has drawn me from my hole, like a rat to the Pied Piper, and I do thank you most sincerely. But being drawn, what I most wished to thank the Piper for was—"

"Your mother pays the Piper for that," she broke in.

He smiled but tossed his head. "Money! what is that?"

"It is more than I deserve for mere companionship—pleasant drives and theatres."

He did not accept her delicate reticence.

"But you have altered her wonderfully!" he cried.

"Oh, I have not," she cried, doubly startled. "It's just nothing that I have done—nothing." Then she felt her modesty had put her foot in a bog-hole. Unseeingly he helped her out.

"It is most kind of you to put it like that. But I see it in every movement, every word. She imitates you unconsciously—I became curious to see so excellent a model, though I had resolved not to meet you. No, no, please, don't misunderstand."

"I don't," she said mischievously. "You have now given me three reasons for seeing me. You need give me none for not seeing me."

"But you must understand," he said, colouring again, "how painful all this has been for me—"

"Not seeing me?" she interpolated innocently.

"The—the whole thing," he stammered.

"Yes, parents are tiresome," she said sympathetically.

He came nearer the music-stool.

"Are they not? They came down every year for the Eights."

"Is that at Oxford?"

"Yes."

She was silent; her thumb flicked at a note on the keyboard behind her.

"But that's not what I mind in them most—"

She wondered at the rapidity with which his shyness was passing into effusiveness. But then was she not the "Mother-Confessor"? Had not even her favourite nuns told her things about their early lives, even when there was no moral to be pointed? "They're very good-hearted," she murmured apologetically. "I'm often companion—in charity expeditions."

"It's easy to be good-hearted when you don't know what to do with your money. This place is full of such people. But I look in vain for the diviner impulse."

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 athées."

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. À 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.

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 employée 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.