Etta looked him straight in the eyes and said, "Good-night."
CHAPTER IV
TWO PERSONALITIES
Etta Romney was very early awake upon the following morning; and not for the first time since she had come to London did her environment so perplex her that some minutes passed before she could recall the circumstances which had brought her to that square room and made her a stranger in a house of strangers.
Leaping up with a young girl's agility, she drew the blind aside and looked out upon deserted Bedford Square, as beautiful in that early light of morning as Bedford Square could ever be.
How still it all was! Not a footfall anywhere. No milk carts yet to rattle by and suggest the busy day. Nothing but a soft sunshine upon the drawn blinds, a lonely patch of grass beneath lonely trees, and great gaunt houses side by side and so close together that each appeared to be elbowing its neighbor for room in which to stand upright.
Etta returned to her bed and crouched upon it like a pretty wild animal, half afraid of the day. A whole troop of fears and hopes rushed upon her excited brain. What had she done? Of what madness had she not been guilty? To-day the newspapers would tell her. If they told her father also—her father whom she believed to be snug in distant Tuscany—what then, and with what consequences to herself! A fearful dread of this came upon her when she thought of it. She hid her eyes from the light and could hear her own heart beating beneath the bed-clothes.
She was not Etta now, but knew herself by another name, the name of Evelyn, which in this mood of repentance became her better, she thought. True, she had been Etta when she appeared before the people last night, the wild mad Etta, given to feverish dreams in her old Derbyshire home and trying to realize them here amid the garish scenes of London's dramatic life. But arrayed in the white garb of momentary penitence, she was Evelyn, the good nun's pupil; the docile gentle Evelyn awaiting the redemption of her father's promise that the gates of the world should not be shut forever upon her youth, but should open some day to the galleries of a young girl's pleasure. It was the Etta in her which made her impatient and unable to await the appointed time; the Etta which broke out in this mad escapade, ever trembling upon the brink of discovery and fearful in its possibilities of reproach and remorse. But the Evelyn reckoned up the consequences and was afraid of them.
She could not sleep again although it was then but six o'clock of the morning, and she lay for more than an hour listening to those growing sounds which are the overture of a London day. Workmen discussing politics, amiably, if in strident tones, went by with heavy tread upon their way to shop or factory. Milk carts appeared with their far from musical accompaniment of doleful cries and rattling cans. An amorous policeman conducted flirtations dexterously with various cooks, and passed thence with sad step. Then came the postman with his cheery rat-tat at nearly every house; the newsboy with the welcome cry of "piper"; the first of the cabs, the market carts, the railway vans, each contributing something to that voice of tumult without which the metropolis would seem to be a dead city.