"Why don't you go to see her to-night? She's worth a look: she's a pretty little thing—but she don't draw crowds: the gallery's never full."
"I think I'll go to-night," said Francis, rising suddenly from his seat. He fancied that the young man looked at him suspiciously. "Yes, no doubt, I should know her if I saw her: I'll go to-night."
He made his way hastily into the street, while his late companion sent a puzzled glance after him. "Got a tile loose, that chap has," he said to the girl at the counter as he also passed out. "Or else he was a bit screwed."
So that night Francis Trent went to the Frivolity, and witnessed, from a half-empty gallery, a smart, sparkling little society play, in which Ethel Kenyon had elected to say farewell to her admirers.
He saw her, but her face produced no impression upon his mind.
It was not familiar to him, although her name was familiar enough. Those gleaming dark eyes in the saucy piquante face, the tiny graceful figure, the silvery accents of her voice, were perfectly strange to him. They suggested absolutely nothing. It was the name alone that he knew; and he was sure that it was in some way connected with his own.
Before the end of the play, he got up and went out. The lights of the theatre made him dizzy: his head ached from the hot atmosphere and from his own physical weakness. He was afraid that he should cry out or do something strange which would make people look at him, if he sat there much longer. So he turned into a side street and leaned against a wall for a little time, until he felt cool and refreshed. The evening was warm, considering that the month was March, and the air that played upon his face was soft and balmy. When he had recovered himself a little, he noticed a group of young men lighting their cigarettes and loitering about a door in the vicinity. Presently he made out that this was the stage-door, and that these young men were waiting to see one of the actresses come out. By the fragments of their talk that floated to him on the still evening air in the quiet side street, Francis Trent gathered that they spoke a good deal of Ethel Kenyon.
"So this is the last we shall see of pretty little Ethel," he heard one man say. "Who's the man she's hooked, eh?"
Nobody seemed to know.
"Why did she go on the boards at all, I wonder? She's got money, and belongs to a pre-eminently respectable family. Her brother's a doctor."