"Make your mind easy as to that. Why, if my dreams come true, half London will some day be calling you Polly, too."
"I don't know what you mean, sir."
"Of course you don't. I'm not always sure that I know what I do mean. But never mind. Let us take a stroll on the heath. On such a summer night as this it is a shame to be cooped up betwixt four walls. Besides, I want to talk with you."
Manager Palmer bade Lavinia good-night with an air very different from that with which he met her earlier in the evening. Her success and Gay's evident friendship had worked wonders. He was quite deferential.
As Lavinia and Gay passed through the dimly lighted vestibule to the entrance a man from among the audience stole after them. He was very pale and his pallor accentuated his projecting cheek bones and the hollows above, from the depths of which his large eyes gleamed with a glassy light. Evidently in ill health, he could hardly have kept pace with the couple he was shadowing had they not been walking very slowly.
"Everything is in our favour," Gay was saying. "Fortune has sent you here at the right moment. You can act and you can sing. I know it, but John Rich and the Duchess of Queensberry must know it as well. Both your acting and singing must be put to the proof, and you must show her grace that she hasn't wasted her money."
"That's what I'm most anxious to do, sir."
"Aye, aye. Well, to-morrow I shall bring you some of the songs you'll have to sing in my 'Beggar's Opera'—that is if we can talk that curmudgeon Rich into the ideas that I and my friends have in our minds. Are you lodging in Hampstead?"
"Oh, yes. I'm staying with Hannah's cousin. You remember Hannah, don't you, Mr. Gay? I told you what a good friend she was to me and how she saved me from my wicked mother and the designing fellow I was so silly as to run away with. I shall never forget my mad fancies—never!"
"Best forget them, my dear, though I fear you'll be apt to drive out one fit of madness by taking on another. 'Tis the way love has, and——"