His darling sin

by M. E. Braddon

He had to find out who the woman was, and her present whereabouts. He thought it highly probable that so handsome a woman had adorned the burlesque stage at some period of her career, as actress or chorus-girl. The theatre is the only arena where low-born beauty can win the recognition which every handsome girl believes her due; and the desire to tread the stage is almost an instinct in the town-bred girl's mind. She has heard of actresses and their triumphs ever since she can remember. She looks in her glass and sees that she is pretty. She picks up the music-hall tunes, and shrills them as she goes about the house-work, and is sure that she can sing. She skips and prances to the organ in the court, and thinks that she can dance. She discovers some acquaintance of her father's whose second cousin knows the stage-manager at the Thalia Theatre; and, armed with this introduction, her pretty face forces its way to the front row of the ballet, and her shrill voice pipes in unison with her sister cockneys in the chorus.

Such an apprenticeship to the Drama Faunce thought probable in the case of the lady known as Mrs. Randall; so he called upon two of the dramatic agents, most of whom had become known to him in his efforts to disentangle patrician youth from the snares of the theatrical syrens.

He went first to the agent of highest standing in his profession; but this gentleman was either too much a gentleman or too busy to help him. He glanced at Lady Perivale's photograph with a careless eye. Yes, a remarkably handsome woman! But he did not remember anybody in the theatrical world who resembled her. He remembered Sir Hubert Withernsea only as one of the wealthy young fools whom one heard of every season, and seldom heard of long, since they must either pull up or die.

"This young man died," said Faunce. "Now do you happen to remember any lady in your line to whom he attached himself?"

"No; I don't. With a young man of that kind it's generally a good many ladies in my line. He gives supper-parties, and chucks away his money, and nobody cares about him or remembers him when he's gone."

"Ah, but this one had a particular attachment, and the lady was like this," said Faunce, with his hand on the photograph.

"Non mi ricordo," said the agent, and Faunce went a little way farther east, to one of the smaller streets out of the Strand, not more than ten minutes' walk from his own office in Essex Street, and called upon agent number two, whose chief business lay among "the halls," a business that paid well and justified handsome offices, with a lady typist, and the best and newest development in type-writing machines.

Mr. Mordaunt was in the thick of the morning's business when Faunce entered the office, but the detective cultivated an air of never being in a hurry, and he seated himself near an open window in a retired spot, from which he could observe two lady clients who were engaging Mordaunt's attention, and one gentleman client in a white hat and a light-grey frock-coat, patent leather boots, and a gardenia buttonhole, a costume more suggestive of Ascot than of the Strand, who was looking at the innumerable photographs of lovely song-birds, skirt-dancers, lion-comiques, and famous acrobats, that covered the wall, and reading the programmes that hung here and there, lightly stirred by the summer air, and clouded with the summer dust.

The ladies were young, handsome, in a pearl-powdery and carmine-lipped fashion, and dressed in the top of the mode, with picture hats on the most commanding scale, piled with the greatest number of ostrich feathers and paste ornaments the human hat can carry.

"You must look slippy, and get me another turn, Mordy," urged the taller damsel, whose name appeared in the theatrical papers as "Vicky Vernon, the Wide World's Wonder." "Fact is, I ain't gettin' a livin' wage."