Poor Lenore! What an actress, and what a hopelessly womanly woman, still mourning the providential demise of an impossible brother who had lived on her.
She was on the stage now, looking about seventeen, all youth and garden hat and white muslin.
Marion's face twitched. She was living her own youth over again.
There was a pause. Lenore picked a rose to gain time, and looked into the wings.
"Delacour!" roared the manager, bouncing up in his stall and then sitting down again.
"We cut it here," said Lenore, advancing to the footlights, "and he doesn't know. It is not his fault. He's waiting for his cue. See, Mr. Delacour! Leave out that bit about the daisies, and come on at 'happiness.'"
The understudy came on, and Marion's heart thrust suddenly at her like a rapier, and left her for dead, staring in front of her.
This was no understudy. This was the original George of the drama when it was first acted. Marion saw the lover of her youth come on and kiss Lenore's hand, with the same gesture with which he had once kissed hers—in the sunshine, in a Kentish garden, beside a lavender bush, with a bumble bee in it, ten endless years ago.
He was hardly changed—a little thinner, perhaps, but not a day older in his paint; the same reckless, debonair creature whom Marion had loved, who had wounded her and grieved her, whom she had discarded at last with bitter anger, whom she had never forgotten, whom she remembered with anguish.
The curtain was down before she recovered herself, and the conductor was waving his baton.