"Lucy! Don't!" he interrupted in anguished tones. "As there is a heaven above us, I had no suspicion—"
"But you have now," the Prince interrupted with a bitter laugh. Neither made any attempt to touch the other, though they were but a few inches apart. "Out with it!"
"Lucy, I have nothing to say against you. How should I? I know nothing. It is for you to speak. For pity's sake tell me all. What is this masquerade?"
"This masquerade?" She touched her pink tights—he shuddered at the touch. "These are—" She paused. Why not tell the easy lie and be done with the whole business, and marry the dear, devoted boy? But the mad instinct of revolt and resentment swept over her in a flood that dragged the truth from her heart and hurled it at him. "These are the legs of Prince Prettypet. If I am lucky, I shall stand on them in the pantomime of The Enchanted Princess; or, Harlequin Dick Turpin, at the Oriental Theatre. The man who has the casting of the part is coming to see how I look."
"You have gone on the stage?"
"Yes; I couldn't live on your lectures," Prince Prettypet said, still in the same resentful tone. "I couldn't fritter away the little capital I had when mamma died, and then wait for starvation. I had no useful accomplishments. I could only recite—Athalie."
"But surely your aunt—"
"Is a fiction. Had she been a fact it would have been all the same. I had had enough of mamma. No more leading-strings!"
"Lucy! And you wept over her so in your letters?"
"Crocodile's tears. Heavens, are women to have no lives of their own?"