'Let us prove our love one to the other,' he murmured, and frightened, but at the same time delighted by the words, she allowed him to draw her into his room.
'My husband will miss me,' she said as the door closed, but she could think no more of him; he was forgotten in a sudden delirium of the senses; and for what seemed to him like half an hour Ralph waited, asking himself what his wife could be doing all that time, thinking that perhaps it was not Lennox after all, but some rambling vagrant who had knocked at the door, and that he had better go down and rescue his wife. He would have done so had he not been afraid of a sudden draught, and while wondering what was happening he dozed away, to be awakened a few minutes afterwards by voices on the landing.
'Let me go, Dick, let me go; my husband will miss me.' She passed away from him and entered her husband's room, and Ralph said: 'Well, who was it?'
'Mr. Lennox,' she answered.
'Our lodger,' Ralph murmured, and fell asleep again.
X
'Is this the stage entrance?'
'Yes, ma'am; you see, during the performance the real stage-door is used as a pit entrance, and we pass under the stage.'
This explanation was given after a swaggering attitude had been assumed, and a knowing wink, the countersign for 'Now I'm going to do something for your amusement,' had been bestowed on his pals. The speaker, a rough man with a beard and a fez cap, became the prominent figure of a group loitering before a square hole with an earthward descent, cut in the wall of the Hanley Theatre.
Kate was too occupied with her own thoughts to notice that she was being laughed at, and she said instantly, 'I want to see Mr. Lennox; will you tell him I'm here?'