And she sank down by the side of my chair and hid her face, and I could only see her honey-coloured hair. I stroked it. I knew all her history, in that supreme moment, without a word of explanation. I knew that she had been self-deceived, that she had been through many an agony, that she had always loved me.... And she was so young, so young.
I kissed her hair.
“How thankful I am!” breathed Mrs. Vernon afterwards. “Suppose it had not turned out well!”
Jack Vernon had calculated with some skill. When he came back, the constraint, the diffidence, was at an end.
A DINNER AT THE LOUVRE.
THE real name of this renowned West-End restaurant is not the Louvre. I have christened it so because the title seems to me to suit it very nicely, and because a certain disguise is essential. The proprietors of the Louvre—it belongs to an esteemed firm of caterers—would decidedly object to the coupling of the name of their principal establishment with an affair so curious and disconcerting as that which I am about to relate. And their objection would be perfectly justifiable. Nevertheless, the following story is a true one, and the details of it are familiar to at least half a dozen persons whose business it is, for one reason or another, to keep an eye upon that world of crime and pleasure, which is bounded on the east by Bow Street and on the left by Hyde Park Corner.
It was on an evening in the last week of May that I asked Rosie Mardon to dine with me at the Louvre. I selected the Louvre, well knowing that from some mysterious cause all popular actresses prefer the Louvre to other restaurants, although the quality of the food there is not always impeccable. I am not in the habit of inviting the favourites of the stage to dinner, especially favourites who enjoy a salary of seventy-five pounds a week, as Rosie Mardon did and does. But in the present case I had a particular object in view. Rosie Mardon was taking the chief feminine rôle in my new light comedy, then in active rehearsal at the Alcazar Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue. We had almost quarrelled over her interpretation of the big scene in the second act, which differed materially from my own idea of how the scene ought to go. Diplomacy was necessary. I prided myself on my powers as a diplomatist: I knew that if I could chat with Miss Rosie in the privacy of a table for two at a public restaurant (there is no privacy more discreet), I could convert her to my opinions on that second act.