Some little time after, she joined Godolphin in the desolate apartment below. She put her hand in his, and her tears—for she wept easily—flowed fast down her cheeks, washing away the lavish rouge which imperfectly masked the wrinkles that Time had lately begun to sow on a surface Godolphin had remembered so fair and smooth.
"Poor Saville!" said she, falteringly; "he died without a pang. Ah! he had the best temper possible."
Godolphin sat by the writing-table of the deceased, shading his brow with the hand which the actress left disengaged.
"Fanny," said he, bitterly, after a pause, "the world is indeed a stage.
It has lost a consummate actor, though in a small part."
The saying was wrung from Godolphin—and was not said unkindly, though it seemed so—for he too had tears in his eyes.
"Ah," said she, the play-house has indeed taught us, in our youth, many things which the real world could not teach us better."
"Life differs from the play only in this," said Godolphin, some time afterwards; "it has no plot—all is vague, desultory, unconnected—till the curtain drops with the mystery unsolved."
Those were the last words that Godolphin ever addressed to the actress.