"An actress!" he repeated, stupefied.
"Yes, an actress, and my name is not Nellie King; but I will tell you all about this later."
"How can you be an actress and live like this?" asked Edward, in his simplicity, looking around.
"Oh—I make lots of money—I have been successful," and then she told him her life.
Stage-struck, she had left her home three years before, and her parents knew not where she went. Her voice bad won great success for her from the beginning, but when the excitement of the first success had passed, she found herself lonesome, unhappy, craving for some one to love, some one who would care for her, and not for her success. She spoke of the men who sent her baskets of flowers and begged to be her slave; these men she despised, she said, "because they care for me only on account of my success—let my voice fail and they will stop sending flowers. It flatters them to be seen with me, because I am a success; but when I have grown old, and my voice will be gone, what will they care for me then?" and tears came to her eyes when she said these last words.
"Why don't you go back to your home in Canada?" asked Edward, feelingly.
"My mother has died since I left, and how I have cried! I have felt that I was the cause of her death, and I know that my father would never forgive me."
"Poor Nellie," Edward said, holding her hand, tempted to kiss it.
"Oh! Edward, motherless, and without any real true friends, don't you pity me? The only time I am happy is when I look back to the days of my childhood; then I smile as one must when dreaming a happy dream in the quiet of the night."
During all this time Edward had listened with tears in his eyes. His sympathetic nature had thrown open the doors of his heart and soul; he was enraptured, and it was all he could do not to fall at her feet and tell her of his love. He wanted to live his life with hers; he felt drawn toward that strange nature, and loved her intensely, as he sat there holding and pressing her hand. There seemed to be an established current of a mysterious magnetic fluid that drew his whole life to her.