his head to fancy himself in love with her.  Therefore, when she threw herself into his arms, he hugged her in a very sincere and brotherly way, but kissed her with a pair of cast lips of Adonis.  Of course he would never forget her.  Jane went to bed and sobbed her heart out.  Paul slept but little.  The breaking up of the home meant the end of many precious and gentle things, and without them he knew that his life would be the poorer.  And he vowed once more, to himself, that he would never prove disloyal to Jane.

While he remained in London he saw what he could of her, sacrificing many a Sunday’s outing with the theatre folk.  Jane, instinctively aware of this, and finding in his demeanour, after examining it with femininely jealous, microscopic eyes, nothing perfunctory, was duly grateful. and gave him of her girlish best.  She developed very quickly after her entrance into the worid of struggle.  Very soon it was the woman and not the child who listened to the marvellous youth’s story of the wonders that would be.  She never again threw herself into his arms, and he never again called her a “little silly.”  She was dimly aware of change, though she knew that the world could hold no other man for her.  But Paul was not.

And then Paul went on tour.

CHAPTER VII

Paul had been four years on the stage.  Save as a memory they had as little influence on the colour of his after-life as his years at Bludston or his years in the studios.  He was the man born to be king.  The attainment of his kingdom alone mattered.  The intermediary phases were of no account.  It had been a period of struggle, hardship and, as far as the stage itself was concerned, disillusion.  After the first year or so, the goddess Fortune, more fickle in Theatreland, perhaps, than anywhere else, passed him by.  London had no use for his services, especially when it learned that he aspired to play parts.  It even refused him the privilege of walking on and understudying.  He drifted into the provinces, where, when he obtained an engagement, he found more scope for his ambitions.  Often he was out, and purchased with his savings the bread of idleness.  He knew the desolation of the agent’s dingy stairs; he knew the heartache of the agent’s dingy outer office.

He was familiar, too, with bleak rehearsals, hours of listless waiting for his little scenes; with his powerlessness to get into his simple words the particular intonation required by an overdriven producer.  Familiar, too, with long and hungry Sunday railway journeys when pious refreshment rooms are shut; with little mean towns like Bludston, where he and three or four of the company shared the same mean theatrical lodgings; with the dirty, insanitary theatres; with the ceaseless petty jealousies and bickerings of the ill-paid itinerant troupe.  The discomforts affected Paul but little, he had never had experience of luxuries,