while all the time keeping their eyes furtively fixed on the gleaming animated profile and graceful shoulders over which, in the entrance of the second drawing-room, the Minister's gray head was bending.

Mrs. Stuart did her duty bravely. Miss Bretherton had announced to her, with a thousand regrets, that she had only half an hour to give. 'We poor professionals, you know, must dine at four. That made me late, and now I find I am such a long way from home that six is the latest moment I can stay.' So that Mrs. Stuart was put to it to get through all the introductions she had promised. But she performed her task without flinching, killing remorselessly each nascent conversation in the bud, giving artist, author, or member of Parliament his proper little sentence of introduction, and at last beckoning to Eustace Kendal, who left his corner feeling society to be a foolish business, and wishing the ordeal were over.

Miss Bretherton smiled at him as she had smiled at all the others, and he sat down for his three minutes on the chair beside her.

'I hear you are satisfied with your English audiences, Miss Bretherton,' he began at once, having prepared himself so far. 'To-night I am to have the pleasure for the first time of making one of your admirers.'

'I hope it will please you,' she said, with a shyness that was still bright and friendly. 'You will be sure to come and see me afterwards? I have been arranging it with Mrs. Stuart. I am never fit to talk to afterwards, I get so tired. But it does one good to see one's friends; it makes one forget the theatre a little before going home.'

'Do you find London very exciting?'

'Yes, very. People have been so extraordinarily kind to me, and it is all such a new experience after that little place Kingston. I should have my head turned, I think,' she added, with a happy little laugh, 'but that when one cares about one's art one is not likely to think too much of one's self. I am always despairing over what there is still to do, and what one may have done seems to make no matter.'

She spoke with a pretty humility, evidently meaning what she said, and yet there was such a delightful young triumph in her manner, such an invulnerable consciousness of artistic success, that Kendal felt a secret stir of amusement as he recalled the criticisms which among his own set he had most commonly heard applied to her.

'Yes, indeed,' he answered pleasantly. 'I suppose every artist feels the same. We all do if we are good for anything—we who scribble as well as you who act.'

'Oh yes,' she said, with kindly, questioning eyes, 'you write a great deal? I know; Mr. Wallace told me. He says you are so learned, and that your book will be splendid. It must be grand to write books. I should like it, I think, better than acting. You need only depend on yourself; but in acting you're always depending on some one else, and you get in such a rage when all your own grand ideas are spoilt because the leading gentleman won't do anything different from what he has been used to, or the next lady wants to show off, or the stage manager has a grudge against you! Something always happens.'

'Apparently the only thing that always happens to you is success,' said Kendal, rather hating himself for the cheapness of the compliment. 'I hear wonderful reports of the difficulty of getting a seat at the Calliope; and his friends tell me that Mr. Robinson looks ten years younger. Poor man! it is time that fortune smiled on him.'

'Yes, indeed; he had a bad time last year. That Miss Harwood, the American actress, that they thought would be such a success, didn't come off at all. She didn't hit the public. It doesn't seem to me that the English public is hard to please. At that wretched little theatre in Kingston I wasn't nearly so much at my ease as I am here. Here one can always do one's best and be sure that the audience will appreciate it. I have all sorts of projects in my head. Next year I shall have a theatre of my own, I think, and then—'

'And then we shall see you in all the great parts?'

The beauty had just begun her answer when Kendal became conscious of Mrs.
Stuart standing beside him, with another aspirant at her elbow, and
nothing remained for him but to retire with a hasty smile and handshake,
Miss Bretherton brightly reminding him that they should meet again.

A few minutes afterwards there was once more a general flutter in the room. Miss Bretherton was going. She came forward in her long flowing black garments, holding Mrs. Stuart by the hand, the crowd dividing as she passed. On her way to the door stood a child, Mrs. Stuart's youngest, looking at her with large wondering brown eyes, and finger on lip. The actress suddenly stooped to her, lifted her up with the ease of physical strength into the midst of her soft furs and velvets, and kissed her with a gracious queenliness. The child threw its little white arms around her, smiled upon her, and smoothed her hair, as though to assure itself that the fairy princess was real. Then it struggled down, and in another minute the bright vision was gone, and the crowded room seemed to have grown suddenly dull and empty.

'That was prettily done,' said Edward Wallace to Kendal as they stood together looking on. 'In another woman those things would be done for effect, but I don't think she does them for effect. It is as though she felt herself in such a warm and congenial atmosphere, she is so sure of herself and her surroundings, that she is able to give herself full play, to follow every impulse as it rises. There is a wonderful absence of mauvaise honte about her, and yet I believe that, little as she knows of her own deficiencies, she is really modest—'

'Very possibly,' said Kendal; 'it is a curious study, a character taken so much au naturel, and suddenly transported into the midst of such a London triumph as this. I have certainly been very much attracted, and feel inclined to quarrel with you for having run her down. I believe I shall admire her more than you do to-night.'

'I only hope you may,' said the American cordially; 'I am afraid, however, that from any standard that is worth using there is not much to be said for her as an actress. But as a human being she is very nearly perfection.'

The afternoon guests departed, and just as the last had gone, Mr. Forbes was announced. He came in in a bad temper, having been delayed by business, and presently sat down to dinner with Mrs. Stuart and Wallace and Kendal in a very grumbling frame of mind. Mr. Stuart, a young and able lawyer, in the first agonies of real success at the bar, had sent word that he could not reach home till late.

'I don't know, I'm sure, what's the good of going to see that girl with you two carping fellows,' he began, combatively, over his soup. 'She won't suit you, and you'll only spoil Mrs. Stuart's pleasure and mine.'

'My dear Forbes,' said Wallace in his placid undisturbed way, 'you will see I shall behave like an angel. I shall allow myself no unpleasant remarks, and I shall make as much noise as anybody in the theatre.'

'That's all very well; but if you don't say it, Kendal will look it; and
I don't know which is the most damping.'

'Mrs. Stuart, you shall be the judge of our behaviour,' said Kendal, smiling—he and Forbes were excellent friends. 'Forbes is not in a judicial frame of mind, but we will trust you to be fair. I suppose, Forbes, we may be allowed a grumble or two at Hawes if you shut our mouths on the subject of Miss Bretherton.'

'Hawes does his best,' said Forbes, with a touch of obstinacy. 'He looks well, he strides well, he is a fine figure of a man with a big