After my marriage, though Mr. Faringfield’s handsome settlement would have enabled Fanny and me to live far more pretentiously, we were content to remain in the Hampstead cottage.  Fanny would not hear to our living under a separate roof from that of my mother, whose constant society she had come to regard as necessary to her happiness.

Philip now arranged to pursue the study of architecture in the office of a practitioner of that art; and he gave his leisure hours to the improving of his knowledge of London.  He made acquaintances; passed much time in the Pall Mall taverns; and was able to pilot me about the town, and introduce me to many agreeable habitues of the coffee-houses, as if he were the elder resident of London, and I were the newcomer.  And so we arrived at the Spring of 1786, and a momentous event.

CHAPTER XIX.

We Meet a Play-actress There.

It was Philip’s custom, at this time, to attend first nights at the playhouses, as well from a love of the theatre as from the possibility that he might thus come upon Captain Falconer.  He always desired my company, which I was the readier to grant for that I should recognise the captain in any assemblage, and could point him out to Phil, who had never seen him.  We took my mother and Fanny excepting when they preferred to stay at home, which was the case on a certain evening in this Spring of 1786, when we went to Drury Lane to witness the reappearance of a Miss Warren who had been practising her art the previous three years in the provinces.  This long absence from London had begun before my mother and I arrived there, and consequently Philip and I had that evening the pleasurable anticipation of seeing upon the stage a much-praised face that was quite new to us.

[Illustration:  “IT WAS PHILIP’S CUSTOM, AT THIS TIME, TO ATTEND FIRST NIGHTS AT THE PLAYHOUSES.”]

There was the usual noisy throng of coaches, chairs, people afoot, lackeys, chair-men, boys, and such, in front of the playhouse when we arrived, and though we scanned all faces on whom the light fell, we had our wonted disappointment regarding that of Captain Falconer.  We made our way to the pit, and passed the time till the bell and the chorus “Hats off!” signalled the rising of the green curtain, in watching the chattering assemblage that was every moment swelled from the doors; but neither among the lace-ruffled bucks and macaronis who chaffed with the painted and powdered ladies in the boxes, nor among those dashing gentry who ogled the same towering-haired ladies from the benches around us in the pit, did I perceive the elegant and easy captain.  We therefore fell back upon the pleasure to be expected from the play itself, and when the curtain rose, I, for one, was resigned to the absence of him we had come partly in quest of.