“I aspeck he’s only wented away,” she insisted. “I aspeck he’ll come back down the chiminy one night. My lamb what Santy Claus gave me saided he was perfickatally sure faver would come back down the chiminy one night. So, I fink we’d better leave the gas burning, don’t you, because he wouldn’t like to come back all in the dark, would he?”
Mrs. Kino was in the room when Letizia put forward this theory and with a dumpy hand she silently patted the black sleeve of Nancy, who had turned away to hide the tears.
Perhaps the kindest thing that fortune could have done for the young widow was to throw difficulties in the way of her obtaining an engagement. Had she found a “shop” immediately and gone out on tour alone after those happy years of joint engagements the poignancy of her solitude might have overwhelmed her. The battle for a livelihood kept her from brooding.
But it was a battle through that icy winter, with the little pile of sovereigns growing shorter and shorter every day and Nancy nearly starving herself that Letizia might lack nothing.
“Some people burn coal as if it was paper,” Miss Fewkes sniffed. She did not know that every half-hundredweight meant no lunch for her lodger, and if she had, she would only have despised her for it.
“Nothing this morning, I’m afraid,” the agent would say. “But something may be turning up next week. Two or three companies will be going out presently. Look in again, Miss O’Finn. I’m not forgetting you. You shall have a chance for the first suitable engagement on my books. Cold weather, isn’t it? Wonderful how this frost holds. Good morning.”
Down one long flight of draughty stone stairs in Garrick Street. Up another flight of tumbledown wooden stairs in Maiden Lane. Two hours’ wait in an icy room with nothing to warm one but the flaming posters stuck on the walls.
“Ah, is that you, Miss O’Finn? I’m glad you looked in to-day. Mr. Howard Smythe is taking out The New Dress. Have you seen it? Capital little farce. There’s a part that might suit you.”
Any part would suit her, Nancy thought, for she was beginning to lose hope of ever being engaged again.
“Look in this afternoon, Miss O’Finn, round about three. Mr. Howard Smythe will be here then to interview a few ladies.”