“You—you might have turned it into a theatre!” she stammered apologetically.
He waved the suggestion away with a jewelled hand. “Only a new Temple of Thespis could live up to Anthony and Cleopatra. We are building!”
“Where?” Now it was Jinny that was mystified—she had seen no such enterprise afoot.
“Here!” He tapped the other pocket of his dressing-gown. “Plans!” He rolled up his poster reluctantly. “Cleopatra wanted to see it in print. Didn’t I say what a work getting married was? But now that the bridesmaid’s settled——!”
“But she’s not!” said Jinny, more alarmed than when he was trying to cast her for the bride, perhaps because the danger of being sucked in was greater.
“Oh, Jinny!” He looked at her with large reproachful eyes and mechanically threw bacon to Nip, who had at last sniffed his way in, and who, fortunately for Martha’s composure, caught it ere it reached her carpet. “You see she wants to have the thing all regular and respectable, and all her family are in Wales. She hasn’t got a parent handy to give her away. And having led a wandering life, she hadn’t even a parish to marry in. I never thought you’d desert an old pal.”
“But I’m no pal of hers—I don’t even know her.”
“Oh, Jinny!” And just arresting a paper-slide, he extricated a photograph from the imperilled mass. “The new Scott Archer process,” he declared proudly. “Knocks your daguerreotypes into the middle of last week. Good gag that, eh?”
But it was Jinny who seemed knocked into that period; and not only by this new triumph of the camera. For in this wonderful breathing image she recognized—in all save size, for this seemed a Cleopatra swelling to regal stature—the beauteous human doll she had last seen walking down the steps of a toy house, conning a part.
“But she’s married!” she gasped.