“Well!”
“He greeted me effusively. He offered me at once an engagement. I told him that I was not ‘Alcide.’ He only laughed. He had seen the announcement of your marriage in the papers, and he imagined that I simply wanted to remain unknown because of your husband’s puritanism. I sang to him, and he was satisfied. I did not appear, I have never announced myself as ‘Alcide.’ It was the Press who forced the identity upon me.”
“They were my posters,” Annabel said. “The ones Cariolus did for me.”
“The posters at least,” Anna answered quietly, “I have some claim to. You know very well that you took from my easel David Courtlaw’s study of me, and sent it to Cariolus. You denied it at the time—but unfortunately I have proof. Mr. Courtlaw found the study in Cariolus’ studio.”
Annabel laughed hardly.
“What did it matter?” she cried. “We are, or rather we were, so much alike then that the portrait of either of us would have done for the other. It saved me the bother of being studied.”
“It convinced Mr. Earles that I was ‘Alcide,’” Anna remarked quietly.
“We will convince him now to the contrary,” Annabel answered.
Anna looked at her, startled.