“He spends hours of every day on the pavement below,” Anna answered calmly. “I have been bearing this—for your sake. Shall I send him to Sir John?”
Annabel was white to the lips, but her anger was not yet spent.
“It was your own fault,” she exclaimed. “He would never have found you out if you had not personated me.”
“On the contrary,” Anna whispered quietly, “we met in a small boarding-house where I was stopping.”
“You have not told me yet,” Annabel said, “how it is that you have dared to personate me. To call yourself ‘Alcide’! Your hair, your gestures, your voice, all mine! Oh, how dared you do it?”
“You must not forget,” Anna said calmly, “that it is necessary for me also—to live. I arrived here with something less than five pounds in my pocket. My reception at West Kensington you know of. I was the black sheep, I was hurried out of the way. You did not complain then that I personated you—no, nor when Sir John came to me in Paris, and for your sake I lied.”
“You did not——”
“Wait, Annabel! When I arrived in London I went to live in the cheapest place I could find. I set myself to find employment. I offered myself as a clerk, as a milliner, as a shop girl. I would even have taken a place as waitress in a tea shop. I walked London till the soles of my shoes were worn through, and my toes were blistered. I ate only enough to keep body and soul together.”
“There was no need for such heroism,” Annabel said coldly. “You had only to ask——”
“Do you think,” Anna interrupted, with a note of passion trembling also in her tone, “that I would have taken alms from Sir John, the man to whom I had lied for your sake. It was not possible. I went at last when I had barely a shilling in my purse to a dramatic agent. By chance I went to one who had known you in Paris.”