"Oh! pray let me see it," said Miss Hughes: "I am so anxious to know who the lady is, and so desirous that Joe should be happy."
"Why, upon my word," said Mrs. Lewis, "I think I should be doing wrong if I showed it to you, unless Joe said I might."
"Wrong!" echoed the young lady; "oh! if you only knew how much I have suffered since last night!" Here she paused for some moments, and added, with some violence of tone and manner, that if that suspense lasted much longer, she should go mad.
"Hey-day! Miss Maria," exclaimed Mrs. Lewis,—"mad! Why, surely you cannot have been so imprudent as to have formed an attachment to Joe yourself? But you shall see the letter, as you wish it; there is only one thing you must promise, and that is, to plead Joe's cause with the lady herself."
Miss Hughes hesitated, faltered, and at length said, she would try.
At this point of the discourse, Mrs. Lewis produced the laboured composition, and placed it in her hand.
Miss Hughes raised the letter, glanced at the direction, saw her own name written as plainly as the nervous fingers of its agitated writer would permit, let it fall to the ground, and sunk into the arms of Mrs. Lewis.
While this scene was acting in a private room, Grimaldi was acting upon the public stage; and conscious that his hopes depended upon his exertions, he did not suffer his anxieties, great as they were, to interfere with his performance. Towards the conclusion of the first piece he heard somebody enter Mr. Hughes's box—and there sat the object of all his anxiety.
"She has got the letter," thought the trembling actor; "she must have decided by this time."
He would have given all he possessed to have known what had passed,—when the business of the stage calling him to the front, exactly facing the box in which she sat, their eyes met, and she nodded and smiled. This was not the first time that Miss Hughes had nodded and smiled to Joseph Grimaldi, but it threw him into a state of confusion and agitation which at once deprived him of all consciousness of what he was about. He never heard that he did not finish the scene in which he was engaged at the moment, and he always supposed, in consequence, that he did so: but how, or in what manner, he never could imagine, not having the slightest recollection of anything that passed.