“Where are the skins, Gerty?”

“Near Castle Dare,” answered Miss White, turning to get something else for her neck; “there is a steep hill, and the road comes over it.  When you climb to the top of the hill and sit down, the fairies will carry you right to the bottom if you are in a proper frame of mind.  But they won’t appear at all unless you are at peace with all men.  I will show you the skins when you are in a proper frame of mind, Carry.”

“Who told you that story?” she asked quickly.

“Sir Keith Macleod,” the elder sister said, without thinking.

“Then he has been writing to you?”

“Certainly.”

She marched out of the room.  Gertrude White, unconscious of the fierce rage she had aroused, carelessly proceeded with her toilet, trying now one flower and now another in the ripples of her sun-brown hair, but finally discarding these half-withered things for a narrow band of blue velvet.

    “Threescore o’ nobles rode up the king’s ha’,”

she was humming thoughtlessly to herself as she stood with her hands uplifted to her head, revealing the beautiful lines of her figure,

    “But Bonnie Glenogie’s the flower o’ them a’;
     Wi’ his milk-white steed and his coal-black e’e: 
     Glenogie, dear mither, Glenogie for me!”

At length she had finished, and was ready to proceed to her immediate work of overhauling domestic affairs.  When Keith Macleod was struck by the exceeding neatness and perfection of arrangement in this small house, he was in nowise the victim of any stage-effect.  Gertrude White was at all times and in all seasons a precise and accurate house-mistress.  Harassed, as an actress must often be, by other cares; sometimes exhausted with hard work; perhaps tempted now and again by the self-satisfaction of a splendid triumph to let meaner concerns go unheeded; all the same, she allowed nothing to interfere with her domestic duties.

“Gerty,” her father said, impatiently, to her a day or two before they left London for the provinces, “what is the use of your going down to these stores yourself?  Surely you can send Jane or Marie.  You really waste far too much time over the veriest trifles:  how can it matter what sort of mustard we have?”

“And, indeed, I am glad to have something to convince me that I am a human being and a woman,” she had said, instantly, “something to be myself in.  I believe Providence intended me to be the manager of a Swiss hotel.”

This was one of the first occasions on which she had revealed to her father that she had been thinking a good deal about her lot in life, and was perhaps beginning to doubt whether the struggle to become a great and famous actress was the only thing worth living for.  But he paid little attention to it at the time.  He had a vague impression that it was scarcely worth discussing about.  He was pretty well convinced that his daughter was clever enough to argue herself into any sort of belief about herself, if she should take some fantastic notion into her head.  It was not until that night in Manchester that he began to fear there might be something serious in these expressions of discontent.