It would have been difficult to imagine the owner of that face doing any good or great work in the world, or leaving any mark upon his time, save some petty episode of vanity, profligacy, and selfishness in the memoirs of a modern St. Simon.
“Anything new in the evening papers?” asked Mr. Clare, with a stifled yawn.
The languid enquiry followed upon a silence that had lasted rather too long to be pleasant.
“Sampson had not got his Globe when I left him,” answered John Treverton; “but in the present stagnation of everything at home and abroad I confess to feeling very little interest in the evening papers.”
“I should like to have heard if that unlucky dancer is dead,” said Celia.
John Treverton, who had been standing beside Laura’s chair like a man lost in a waking dream, turned suddenly at this remark.
“What dancer?” he asked.
“La Chicot. Of course you have seen her dance. You happy Londoners see everything under the sun that is worth seeing. She is something wonderful, is she not? And now I suppose I shall never see her.”
“She’s a very handsome woman, and a very fine dancer, in her particular style,” answered Treverton. “But what did you mean just now when you talked about her death. She is as much alive as you and I are, at least I know that her name was on all the walls and she was dancing nightly when I left London.”
“That was a week ago,” said Celia. “Surely you saw the account of the accident in this morning’s Times. There was nearly a column about it.”
“I did not look at the Times. Mr. Sampson and I started early this morning for a long round. What was this accident?”
“Oh, quite too dreadful,” exclaimed Celia. “It made my blood run cold to read the description. It seems that the poor thing had to go up into the flies, or the skies, or something, hooked on to some moveable irons—a kind of telescopic arrangement, you know.”
“Yes, yes, I know,” said Treverton.
“Well, of course that would be awfully jolly as long as it was safely done, for she must look lovely floating upwards, with the limelight shining on her; but it seems the man who had the management of the iron machine got tipsy, and did not know what he was doing, so the irons were not properly braced together, and just as she was near the top the thing gave way and she came down headlong.”
“And was killed?” asked John Treverton breathlessly.
“No, she was not killed on the spot, but her leg was broken—a compound fracture, I think they call it, and she was hurt about the head, and the paper said she was altogether in a very precarious state. Now I have noticed that when a newspaper says that a person is in a precarious state, the next thing one hears of that person is that he or she is dead; so that I shouldn’t at all wonder if La Chicot’s death were in the evening papers.”
“What a loss to society,” sneered Edward Clare. “I think you are the most ridiculous girl in the world, Celia, to interest yourself in people who are as far off your groove as if they were the inhabitants of the moon.”
“Homo sum,” said Celia, proud of a smattering of Latin, the crumbs that had fallen from her brother’s table, “and all the varieties of mankind are interesting to me. I should like to have been a dancer myself, if I had not been a clergyman’s daughter. It must be an awfully jolly life.”
“Delightful,” exclaimed Edward, “especially when it ends abruptly through the carelessness of a drunken scene shifter.”
“I must say good night and goodbye,” said John Treverton to Laura. “I have my portmanteau to pack ready for an early start tomorrow morning. Indeed, I am inclined to go by the mail tonight. It would save me half a day.”
“The mail leaves at a quarter-past ten. You’ll have to look sharp if you travel by that,” said Edward.
“I’ll try it, at any rate.”
“Good night, Mr. Treverton,” said Laura, giving him her hand.
The lively Celia was not going to let him depart with so cold a farewell. He was a man, and as such, eminently interesting to her.
“We’ll all walk to the gate with you,” she said, “it will be better for us than sitting yawning here, watching the bats skimming across the flower beds.”
They all went, and it happened somehow, to John Treverton’s tremulous delight, that Laura and he were side by side, a little behind the other two.
“I am sorry you are obliged to leave so soon,” said Laura, anxious to say something vaguely civil.
“I should go away more happy than I can tell you, if I thought my going could make you sorry.”
“Oh, I did not mean in such a particular sense,” she said, with a little laugh. “I am sorry for your own sake that you have to leave the country, just when it is so lovely, and to go back to smoky London.”
“If you knew how I hate that world of smoke and all foul things, you would pity me with the uttermost compassion your kind heart can feel,” he answered, very much in earnest. “I am going from all I love to all I detest; and I know not how long it may be before I can
