Lorraine read the glowing terms in which her mother described her new home and employer with a deep sense of relief, seeing in the new venture a probable escape for herself from those relentless demands upon her own scanty purse. A month later came the paragraph, in a voluminous epistle:
“Mr. Raynor says you are to make his house your home whenever you are free. He insists upon giving you a floor all to yourself, like a little flat, where you can receive your friends undisturbed, and feel you have a little home of your own. I am quite certain also that he will try to help you in your career through his interest in the Greenway Theatre.”
If Lorraine wondered at all concerning this unknown man’s interest in her welfare she kept it to herself.
A home instead of the dingy lodgings she had grown to hate, and the prospect of influential help, were sufficiently alluring to drown all other reflections.
When the tour was over she went direct to Kensington, to make her home with her mother until her next engagement. She was already too much a woman of the world not to notice at once that her mother and her host’s relations seemed scarcely those of employee and employer, and there was a little passage of arms between herself and Mrs. Vivian the next morning.
In reply to a long harangue, in which that lady set forth the advantages Lorraine was to gain from her mother’s perspicacity in obtaining such a post, she asked rather shortly:
“And why in the world should Mr. Raynor do all this for me, simply because you are his housekeeper?”
A red spot burned in Mrs. Vivian’s cheek as she replied: “He does it because he wants me to stay; and I have told him I cannot do so unless he makes it possible for me to give you a comfortable, happy home here.”
Lorraine’s lips curled with a scorn she did not attempt to conceal, but she only stood silently gazing across the Park.
She had already decided to make the best of her mother’s deficiencies, seeing she was almost the only relative she possessed, but she had a natural loathing of hypocrisy, and wished she would leave facts alone instead of attempting to gloss them over. Ever since she left school she had been obliged to live in lodgings, because her mother would not take the trouble to try and provide anything more of a home.