This was Miss Lottie Belvoir. She was an actress. Not a famous one by any means—only a fifth-rate one at present; but she was waiting for a favorable opportunity to become a first-rate one. Perhaps the opportunity might come, perhaps it mightn't; meanwhile, Lottie Belvoir was content to work hard and wait. Some day, perchance, she would "fetch" the town, and then she would exchange the grimy back room in Anglesea Terrace for a house at St. John's Wood, the old satin dressing-gown for a costume of Worth, and the lobster and stout for pate de foie gras and champagne. Until that happy time arrived, she was perfectly content with minor parts in the burlesques at the Frivolity Theater.
"Oh, it is you, is it?" she said, without rising or stopping at the manipulation of one of the lobster claws; "I thought I recognized your voice. Who was it said that he never forgot a voice or a face? Some great man. Well, I'm like him. You have come just in time. Have some lobster?"
"No, thank you, Lottie," said Ambrose Austin; "I have only just dined."
"Of course, you swells dine later than ever, now, and that's why you can't turn up at the theater until we have got half through the piece. Well, sit down. Make yourself at home. Take care!" she exclaimed, as he sank into an arm-chair; "that chair's got a castor off. Here, take this," and she kicked and pushed another one toward him. "Don't put your cigar out; I'm just going to have a cigarette. Have some stout? No? Too heavy, I suppose? Well, here's some whisky. And how's the world treating you? You look very flourishing; but you always do."
"I might return the compliment," he said. "You are still on the Frivolity, Lottie?"
"Still at the Friv.," she assented, lighting a cigarette and throwing herself not ungracefully on the sofa. "Why don't you drop in some evening and give me a hand? You are too busy at your club with another kind of hand—a hand at cards, I suppose?" she added with charming candor.
He smiled.
"I'll look in some night," he said; "but I suppose they will soon be going on tour."
"Yes, in another fortnight," she said with a yawn, "and precious glad I shall be. London's getting too warm even for this child."
"And yet I want you to stay in London," he said quietly.