“I don’t know!  You heard what Doss said—­about how you looked from the front; and others have got their eyesight as well as him, and can see you are not well and not—­”

“Not fit to sing—­that’s what you are driving at?”

Saidie was silent.

“I tell you I will sing.  Nothing and no one shall stop me.  I shall just defy them all, and go on, and there’s no law in England to stop me.”

“If you are not a goose, Bella, I never saw one!  What in all the world keeps you on the boards, I cannot see.  Here’s a man come over from N’York with the intention of marrying you; a man who is earning his hundred dollars a week, and you turn up your nose at him.  I can’t understand you.  You seemed proud enough of him a week or two back; but now all on a sudden, for no earthly reason, you show him the cold shoulder.”

“I suppose I can please myself,” answered Bella, and her lip quivered, and the tears began to roll down her cheeks.

“I wish to God I had never left—­Jack,” she said weakly.

Whereupon Saidie gave her what she was pleased to call a “piece of her mind” as to the insane folly of any such speech, the result of which was that Bella wept and coughed herself into a state of collapse, and had to be carried off to bed.

Things did not mend.  Bella persisted, ill though she was, in appearing night after night in public until at length what Saidie had predicted came to pass, and she received a formal notice cancelling her engagement at the Empire on the ground of the extreme delicacy of her health.

Mr. and Mrs. Doss happened to be with her at the time she received the notice, and Bella partially appealed to them.

“You will help me, won’t you?  You won’t allow them to impose upon me so shamefully.  They have no right to do it.  It’s infamous—­’annul my engagement’ indeed!  They shall find out who they are dealing with.  It would be ruin for me, it would simply spoil my career.  I shall go down at once and see Robertson.  It’s a likely thing that I’m going to sit down calmly and quietly and accept my dismissal.  Not if I know it.  I’ll give Robertson beans.”

“I wouldn’t do it if I were you,” said Mrs. Doss quietly.

“Not do it; what do you mean?  You must be dreaming.  It is the only thing to be done.”

And now Mr. Doss, obeying a pathetic glance of his better half, put in his oar.

“Be a bit patient; wait and see how things turn out; don’t do anything in a ’urry—­that’s our advice—­the old gal’s and mine.”

“Yes, take things heasy, I say,” chimed in the “Rabbit Queen.”

“I don’t see what there is to wait for.  Show me what is to be gained by waiting, and I will consider it.”

“Well, Bella; Doss here will tell you what we was thinking of; he puts things clear like.”

“What was in our mind was to talk the thing over first.  Allus talk the matter well over, was my motto as a boy.  It saves a peck o’ bother and a deal o’ doing.  Don’t flare out about it, but take it gently and conversational.”