Part 3

“Oh, for the last month,” replied the lodger; “they are not at all bad--clean and wholesome and all that.”

“But the suppers you gave us, and this,” she cried, suddenly, waving her hands over the pretty tea-things, “and the cake and muffins?”

“My friends, at least,” said Carroll, “need not go to Lockhart’s.”

“And the Savoy?” asked Miss Cavendish, mournfully shaking her head.

“A dream of the past,” said Carroll, waving his pipe through the smoke. “Gatti’s? Yes, on special occasions; but for necessity, the Chancellor’s, where one gets a piece of the prime roast beef of Old England, from Chicago, and potatoes for ninepence--a pot of bitter twopence-halfpenny, and a penny for the waiter. It’s most amusing on the whole. I am learning a little about London, and some things about myself. They are both most interesting subjects.”

“Well, I don’t like it,” Miss Cavendish declared helplessly. “When I think of those suppers and the flowers, I feel--I feel like a robber.”

“Don’t,” begged Carroll. “I am really the most happy of men--that is, as the chap says in the play, I would be if I wasn’t so damned miserable. But I owe no man a penny and I have assets--I have £80 to last me through the winter and two marvellous plays; and I love, next to yourself, the most wonderful woman God ever made. That’s enough.”

“But I thought you made such a lot of money by writing?” asked Miss Cavendish.

“I do--that is, I could,” answered Carroll, “if I wrote the things that sell; but I keep on writing plays that won’t.”

“And such plays!” exclaimed Marion, warmly; “and to think that they are going begging.” She continued indignantly, “I can’t imagine what the managers do want.”

“I know what they don’t want,” said the American. Miss Cavendish drummed impatiently on the tea-tray.

“I wish you wouldn’t be so abject about it,” she said. “If I were a man I’d make them take those plays.”

“How?” asked the American; “with a gun?”

“Well, I’d keep at it until they read them,” declared Marion. “I’d sit on their front steps all night and I’d follow them in cabs, and I’d lie in wait for them at the stage-door. I’d just make them take them.”

Carroll sighed and stared at the ceiling. “I guess I’ll give up and go home,” he said.

“Oh, yes, do, run away before you are beaten,” said Miss Cavendish, scornfully. “Why, you can’t go now. Everybody will be back in town soon, and there are a lot of new plays coming on, and some of them are sure to be failures, and that’s our chance. You rush in with your piece and somebody may take it sooner than close the theatre.”

“I’m thinking of closing the theatre myself,” said Carroll. “What’s the use of my hanging on here?” he exclaimed. “It distresses Helen to know I am in London, feeling about her as I do--and the Lord only knows how it distresses me. And, maybe, if I went away,” he said, consciously, “she might miss me. She might see the difference.”

Miss Cavendish held herself erect and pressed her lips together with a severe smile. “If Helen Cabot doesn’t see the difference between you and the other men she knows now,” she said, “I doubt if she ever will. Besides--” she continued, and then hesitated. “Well, go on,” urged Carroll.

“Well, I was only going to say,” she explained, “that leaving the girl alone never did the man any good unless he left her alone willingly. If she’s sure he still cares, it’s just the same to her where he is. He might as well stay on in London as go to South Africa. It won’t help him any. The difference comes when she finds he has stopped caring. Why, look at Reggie. He tried that. He went away for ever so long, but he kept writing me from wherever he went, so that he was perfectly miserable--and I went on enjoying myself. Then when he came back, he tried going about with his old friends again. He used to come to the theatre with them--oh, with such nice girls--but he always stood in the back of the box and yawned and scowled--so I knew. And, anyway, he’d always spoil it all by leaving them and waiting at the stage entrance for me. But one day he got tired of the way I treated him and went off on a bicycle tour with Lady Hacksher’s girls and some men from his regiment, and he was gone three weeks and never sent me even a line; and I got so scared; I couldn’t sleep, and I stood it for three days more, and then I wired him to come back or I’d jump off London Bridge; and he came back that very night from Edinburgh on the express, and I was so glad to see him that I got confused, and in the general excitement I promised to marry him, so that’s how it was with us.”

“Yes,” said the American, without enthusiasm; “but then I still care, and Helen knows I care.”

“Doesn’t she ever fancy that you might care for some one else? You have a lot of friends, you know.”

“Yes, but she knows they are just that--friends,” said the American.

Miss Cavendish stood up to go, and arranged her veil before the mirror above the fireplace.

“I come here very often to tea,” she said.

“It’s very kind of you,” said Carroll. He was at the open window, looking down into the street for a cab.

“Well, no one knows I am engaged to Reggie,” continued Miss Cavendish, “except you and Reggie, and he isn’t so sure. SHE doesn’t know it.”

“Well?” said Carroll.

Miss Cavendish smiled a mischievous kindly smile at him from the mirror.