Then, for the first time, she saw Arthur Noyes standing with his back against a closed door.  She read pity in his eyes, comprehension, great wonder, and what she did not know then was the love that came to a rare perfection between them and has never faded—­and has no place in this story.

“Will you tell me,” he said, “what your name is, where your home is, and who are those that love you there?”

Then he broke off and shrank a little against the door.  “Oh, don’t,” he protested.

Yet she had only looked at him and smiled.  But it came to her keenly in her new awareness that his questions covered the whole of a woman’s life:  Her name, her home, and the ones that loved her there.  While she—­she had no name, she did not even know the lodger’s name.  She looked down with strange astonishment at her grown-up figure, her woman’s hands.  She saw herself a ragged, gaunt, bushy-headed child moving on a tight rope above a dark abyss, intent only upon a luminous globe floating just out of reach ahead of her, that she stretched out for eagerly with both her hands.  Suddenly the lovely bubble burst and the child was a woman, falling and falling among rows of convulsed, shining white faces to the sound of gargantuan laughter.

“You tell me,” Arthur Noyes pleaded gently.

And she did so very simply and beautifully.  She did know Shakespeare; it was the only English that she had ever been taught.  So Noyes heard how she became an instrument in the hands of the man who hated him mortally, and owed her debut and her terrible awakening to what he considered the only sporting answer to that insult.  While he listened he pondered, awestruck, upon the fact that out of all this muck and blackness, the degradation of hate by the lodger, the refinement of hate by himself, had flowered that rarest of all human creatures—­one that could make the whole world laugh.

“He always hated me,” he said.  “I told him he had traded his genius for drink, and he never forgave me.  Where is he now?”

“Now?” Cake looked up at him in startled wonder.  It came over her suddenly that he counted upon the lodger’s being in the Imperial Theatre that night.

“Now?” she repeated.  “Why, he is dead.”

It took Noyes a minute to recover.  “What will you do?” he asked her.  “Will you go on from this start, continue this—­this sort of success?” He felt it the basest cruelty, in the face of her story, to say it was the only kind she was ever destined to make.  He waited for her answer, wondering, and a little awestruck.  It seemed to him they had come to the supreme test of her genius.

And she looked up at him with such sadness and such mirth—­such tragic, humorous appreciation of the darkness in which she had been born, the toilsome way she had travelled to the Great Light and what it actually revealed when she arrived.

“I will go on from this success,” she said.  Involuntarily she raised her hand to her breast.  “I must, since it is the only way for me.  You see,” with a humour far more touching than the saddest tears, “I must be famous.”