owed his late father a considerable sum of money, which he wished to recover privately to save scandal. That very night Paul was taking Julie to see Mercier's so-called half-sister act in a transpontine theatre. "Vera Anerley," as she had stage-named herself, had been on tour with a popular piece-was absent at the time of Victor's return-and had appealed to his vanity by her wild emotion when they met. He was to see her on the stage, and to have a word with Naz, who had had to probe Julie in a certain direction, after he left his "wife" in the Regent's Park.
When he had watched Joan's hansom speed away in the darkness, Victor Mercier walked along, then-hailing a passing cab, was driven to the theatre. As he went he anathematized Joan in the strongest of mining oaths.
"Like all the rest," he bitterly thought. "Always another man-they must have a man hanging about them!"
Alighting at the theatre, he met Naz, a fair, innocent-looking Frenchman, coming out. He joined him, saying "Come and have a drink."
"You have lost much by being late, your half-sister is adorable!" said Naz, as they stood together at the bar of a neighbouring public-house.
"No doubt!" said Mercier carelessly. "So is your Julie, eh? By the way, how is Julie's mistress? Any news?"
"As I said," returned Naz, in an undertone. "The beautiful creature is trapped at last, by a lover who has been out of the country to try and forget her, shooting big game! They ride-meet-he was with her when I posted you in the corridor that night. They passed me, you must have seen him."
"Him-who?" muttered Mercier. There was a gleam in his eyes.
"Lord Vansittart," replied Naz. "The Duchess has been heard to say it was a settled thing!"
CHAPTER VIII
The Duke's valet prattled on until the second and third liqueurs had solaced his being. Then Victor glanced darkly at the clock.
"Let us go," he roughly said.
The softspoken Naz only thought that the delightful fluid which warmed and comforted his gentle self had had a reverse effect upon his old friend, so-following him gently as Mercier stalked gloomily into the theatre and up to the dress circle, which was well-packed with honest citizens and their wives in their ordinary habit as they lived-he returned to his seat by Julie, and left him to his own devices.
The third act was over. In the fourth Mercier's so-called "sister" had plenty to do. She was a peccant wife, revisiting home in disguise, and seeking her husband's pardon. It was a pathetic scene, when she sought her husband and discovered herself. Throwing off her disguise-she was got up as an old woman-she emerged sweet, fascinating, in a white dress, with her black hair in Magdalen-like confusion, and sinking at his feet, alternately implored and adored with such passion and intensity that tears rolled down the feminine auditors' cheeks, and the house literally rose to her.
"And all that passion is mine, to take or leave as I please," was Victor's saturnine comment, as he leant back in his seat with folded arms and frowned darkly at the stage. He well knew that his amorous dalliance with his step-father's daughter, when he had had nothing more to his taste to dally with, had succeeded in inspiring her with so violent a devotion to him that, if he had not pitied, he might have come to loathe her. When she was a mere pretty, stupid schoolgirl, going to and fro to her middle-class girls' school, satchel in hand, he had had but little patience with her absorption in him and his career. But now that he saw her on the stage, beautiful with an undeniable beauty, full of grace and spontaneity, and possessed of that power which passion gives, he thrilled with mingled desire and satisfaction.
Strange ideas rose up in his mind-ideas of a subtle revenge upon Joan-of intense and vivid gratification to himself.
"Joan will be my wife-my bondslave, to be dealt with how I please, and when I please; and as long as I kiss and caress her no one dare interfere, if I choose that she shall spend almost her life in my arms with my lips on hers," he grimly told himself. "But-Vera loves me-and if I am Vera's lover while I am Joan's uxorious husband, Joan's pride will not allow her to accuse me, even if she suspects! And how her proud, snobbish soul will hate my giving her half my love-as an Eastern potentate gives it to his appointed spouse, while his real devotion is his favourites'!"
The idea gave him a peculiar and indescribable pleasure. It seemed, indeed, to restore his equilibrium. As the curtain fell, he left the auditorium and made his way round to the stage door, as he had promised Vera to do.
"I wish to see Miss Anerley-which is her dressing-room?" he asked, when, after cautiously traversing a dark, unsavoury alley, he had pushed open the swing door, had entered a dimly-lit corridor where a sickly gas flame was flaring in the draught in its wire cage, and met a man coming towards him.
"You are her brother? Come this way, please." The good-natured acting-manager of the touring company, an eager little man in shabby evening dress, escorted Victor along a passage to a door on which "Miss Vera Anerley" was pasted, and knocked.
"It's your brother, Miss Anerley," he called out.
"Thanks! Wait one moment, Victor, will you?" cried a pretty, girlish voice.
"All right." Victor paced the narrow, damp-smelling corridor, hearing the thumps and shouts from the stage, intermingled with a murmur of melodramatic music now and then from the orchestra-making way occasionally for a stage carpenter in shirt-sleeves, or an actor hurrying from his dressing room-until Vera looked out. "I am so sorry to have kept you-come in," she said caressingly, and she pulled him gently in and closed the door.
"Tell me, how do you like me?" she eagerly cried, clasping his hand with both hers. There was no reserve between these two-if, indeed, propinquity had not established complete freedom from what Victor termed gêne long ago-and she gazed up into his face with eyes transparent, shining, darkly blue as sapphires, eyes so brilliant that in admiring them he hardly noticed the coarse red and white grease paint which thickly coated her delicate skin, or the bistre rings around those beautiful orbs. "Victor! Speak! If you are not satisfied, I shall chuck the profession-dearly as I love my work, I couldn't stand it!"
"Silly child!" He patted her hand, and looked round for a seat. There were two broken chairs in the large, bare, cellar-like "dressing-room," with its high window shrouded by a torn and dirty red curtain and its dresser-like table with looking-glasses the worse for wear under the flaring gas jets. But he shook his head at them. "I'll sit here," he said, perching himself on one of the big dress-baskets under the pegs hung with feminine garments. "By George! what a room for a future Lady Macbeth to dress in, to be sure! My dear, don't gasp! That's your style, tragedy, melodrama, bloodcurdling! You're a damned passionate little witch, that's what you are-and I expected as much."
She gave him a rapturous glance as she drew a deep sigh of relief and satisfaction, and sank in a graceful, unstudied attitude upon one of the crippled Windsor chairs; and he dryly lighted a cigarette, and gazed critically at her. She was very fair! Small, with an oval face under glossy masses of dark silken hair; slight and graceful, with a child's hands and feet, and a tiny waist; yet the shoulders rising from her blue ball-dress with its gaudy wreaths of pink flowers were softly rounded-and the contour of neck and bust he considered "simply perfect." He ground his teeth and spat viciously on the blackened boards-there were only pieces of old carpeting here and there-as he remembered his wife-and her supposed lover, "Lord Vansittart." "What a cursed shame!" he thought. "They wallow in wealth-and I and this child-bah! there is something to be said for anarchy, after all!"
"You look-well, I feel I should like to kiss you," he grimly said.
She blushed under her paint. Since her woman's love had waxed so strong, all the former boy-and-girl intimacy went for nothing-she was shy of him.
"If
