His mother!  He had something on his mind to ask of her, something that he had brooded on for many months of silence.  A chance phrase that he had heard at the theatre, a whispered sneer that had reached his ears one night as he waited at the stage-door, had set loose a train of horrible thoughts.  He remembered it as if it had been the lash of a hunting-crop across his face.  His brows knit together into a wedgelike furrow, and with a twitch of pain he bit his underlip.

“You are not listening to a word I am saying, Jim,” cried Sibyl, “and I am making the most delightful plans for your future.  Do say something.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Oh! that you will be a good boy and not forget us,” she answered, smiling at him.

He shrugged his shoulders.  “You are more likely to forget me than I am to forget you, Sibyl.”

She flushed.  “What do you mean, Jim?” she asked.

“You have a new friend, I hear.  Who is he?  Why have you not told me about him?  He means you no good.”

“Stop, Jim!” she exclaimed.  “You must not say anything against him.  I love him.”

“Why, you don’t even know his name,” answered the lad.  “Who is he?  I have a right to know.”

“He is called Prince Charming.  Don’t you like the name.  Oh! you silly boy! you should never forget it.  If you only saw him, you would think him the most wonderful person in the world.  Some day you will meet him—­when you come back from Australia.  You will like him so much.  Everybody likes him, and I ... love him.  I wish you could come to the theatre to-night.  He is going to be there, and I am to play Juliet.  Oh! how I shall play it!  Fancy, Jim, to be in love and play Juliet!  To have him sitting there!  To play for his delight!  I am afraid I may frighten the company, frighten or enthrall them.  To be in love is to surpass one’s self.  Poor dreadful Mr. Isaacs will be shouting ‘genius’ to his loafers at the bar.  He has preached me as a dogma; to-night he will announce me as a revelation.  I feel it.  And it is all his, his only, Prince Charming, my wonderful lover, my god of graces.  But I am poor beside him.  Poor?  What does that matter?  When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window.  Our proverbs want rewriting.  They were made in winter, and it is summer now; spring-time for me, I think, a very dance of blossoms in blue skies.”

“He is a gentleman,” said the lad sullenly.

“A prince!” she cried musically.  “What more do you want?”

“He wants to enslave you.”

“I shudder at the thought of being free.”

“I want you to beware of him.”

“To see him is to worship him; to know him is to trust him.”

“Sibyl, you are mad about him.”

She laughed and took his arm.  “You dear old Jim, you talk as if you were a hundred.  Some day you will be in love yourself.  Then you will know what it is.  Don’t look so sulky.  Surely you should be glad to think that, though you are going away, you leave me happier than I have ever been before.  Life has been hard for us both, terribly hard and difficult.  But it will be different now.  You are going to a new world, and I have found one.  Here are two chairs; let us sit down and see the smart people go by.”