"It won't be so difficult when you try. Go home and read them again and come to me to-morrow morning to sign agreements."
He was pleased at her promise to continue at his theatre and clever enough to understand her reticence.
"She's a genius," he said to himself, "and she's more than that, she's a woman of business. Well, I like her sort. When Belinger goes round, he'll get some dry bread. As for her leaving the stage—pooh! she couldn't do it."
Had he known what Etta was saying at that very moment, his self-satisfaction assuredly had been less. For when she returned to her rooms in Bedford Square she found the expected letter from her father awaiting her there and in it she read these words: "I shall be returning to England on the 29th of June."
She had a short month, then, to live this Bohemian life which so fascinated her! And when that month was over Etta Romney would cease to be, and the stately Lady Evelyn must return.
CHAPTER VI
STRANGERS IN THE HOUSE
The news in the letter alarmed Etta not a little; but when she reflected upon it, she remembered that it was just such news as she had been expecting all along. Her adventure had been for a day. She had never hoped that it would be more. The desire to appear upon the stage of a theatre had haunted her since her childhood. Now she had gratified it. Why, then, should she complain?
True, the glamour of the stage no longer deceived her. All the gilt edge of her dreams had vanished at rehearsal. She no longer believed the theatre to be a paradise on earth. It was a somewhat gloomy, business-like, and sordid arena of which the excitements were purely personal, and concerned chiefly with individual success and achievement. These she had now experienced and found them unsatisfying. A morbid craving for something she could not express or define remained her legacy. The "Etta" in her had not been blotted out by triumph. Had she known it, she would have understood that nothing but tragedy would efface it.