among us.  Many a burlesque quadrille I had with Terriss and others in later days.  On this occasion Clayton suddenly found he was late in changing, and, rushing upstairs to his dressing-room in a hurry, he missed his footing and fell back on his head.  This made me very miserable, as I could not help feeling that I was responsible.  Soon afterwards I left the stage for six years, without the slightest idea of ever going back.  I left it without regret.  And I was very happy, leading a quiet, domestic life in the heart of the country.  When my two children were born, I thought of the stage less than ever.  They absorbed all my time, all my interest, all my love.

IV

A SIX-YEAR VACATION

1868-1874

My disappearance from the stage must have been a heavy blow to my father and mother, who had urged me to return in 1866 and were quite certain that I had a great future.  For the first time for years they had no child in the theater.  Marion and Floss, who were afterward to adopt the stage as a profession, were still at school; Kate had married; and none of their sons had shown any great aptitude for acting.  Fred, who was afterwards to do so well, was at this time hardly out of petticoats.

Perhaps it was because I knew they would oppose me that I left the stage quite quietly and secretly.  It seemed to outsiders natural, if regrettable, that I should follow Kate’s example.  But I was troubling myself little about what people were thinking and saying.  “They are saying—­what are they saying?  Let them be saying!”

Then a dreadful thing happened.  A body was found in the river,—­the dead body of a young woman very fair and slight and tall.  Every one thought that it was my body.

I had gone away without a word.  No one knew where I was.  My own father identified the corpse, and Floss and Marion, at their boarding-school, were put into mourning.  Then mother went.  She kept her head under the shock of the likeness, and bethought her of “a strawberry mark upon my left arm.” (Really I had one over my left knee.) That settled it, for there was no such mark to be found upon the poor corpse.  It was just at this moment that the news came to me in my country retreat that I had been found dead, and I flew up to London to give ocular proof to my poor distracted parents that I was alive.  Mother, who had been the only one not to identify the drowned girl, confessed to me that she was so like me that just for a second she, too, was deceived.  You see, they knew I had not been very happy since my return to the stage, and when I went away without a word, they were terribly anxious, and prepared to believe the first bad tidings that came to hand.  It came in the shape of that most extraordinary likeness between me and that poor soul who threw herself into the river.