“But I have not! You are quite wrong,” she said, with her sweet, thoughtful smile. “I live with an old friend, who has been like a father to me! I haven’t any father or mother, and I see no one, except at the theatre, and then only in the way of business,” and she laughed.
He listened as if every word she dropped from her sweetly-curved lips were a pearl.
“How strange it sounds! You so clever and beau——so great an actress.”
“Yes,” she said dreamily; “I suppose it does sound strange! Everybody thinks that an actress must be the gayest of the gay; surrounded by light-hearted people turning night into day, and living on champagne and roast chicken.” She smiled. “Jeffrey and I know scarcely any one, and I do not think I have tasted champagne, excepting once, when one of the managers had a benefit; and we go straight to bed directly we get home from the theatre; and, oh, it is quite different to what people imagine.”
He drew forward a little, so that the hand upon which he leaned touched the edge of her cotton dress.
“And—and you didn’t quite forget our strange meeting?”
“I am not in the habit of seeing gentlemen flung from their horses at my feet, Lord Neville,” she said, but she turned her face from him.
“And I,” he said. “Why, I have not been able to get it out of my head! I thought of you every minute; and I tried not to, because——”
“Because?” she said. “Pray go on!” and she smiled.
“Well,” he said, modestly, “because it seemed like presumption. And then I went to the theatre, and——” he stopped. “For a moment or two I couldn’t believe that it was really you on the stage there. And when the people in the theatre began to shout out your name, it woke me from a kind of dream.”