“No; I have a horror of cigarettes since that last play.  To smoke in public every night, perforce, took away the charm.  I hated that part.  An adventuress!  It was altogether too close to the quick; for I am nothing more or less than an adventuress who has been successful.  Why, the very method I used to make your acquaintance years and years ago, wasn’t it?—­proved the spirit.  ‘We hate two kinds of people,’” she read, taking up another page of manuscript; “’the people we wrong and the people who wrong us.  Only, the hate for those we have wronged is most enduring.’  That isn’t half bad, Dick.  How do you think of all these things?”

She crossed over to the window to cool her hot face.  She, too, heard the voices of the night; not as the poet hears them, but as one in pain.  “He never loved me!” she murmured, so softly that even the sparrows in the vine heard her not.  And bitter indeed was the pain.  But of what use to struggle, or to sigh, or vainly to regret?  As things are written, so must they be read.  She readily held him guiltless; what she regretted most deeply was the lack of power to have him and to hold him.  Long before, she had realized the hopelessness of it all.  Knowing that he drank from the cup of dissipation, she had even sought to hold him in contempt; but to her he had never ceased to be a gentleman, tender, manly and kind.  It is contempt that casts the first spadeful in the grave of love.

“Come, girl,” he said, going to her side; “you have something to tell me.  What is it?”

She turned to find his hand outstretched and a friendly look in his eyes.  Impulsively she gave him both her hands.  He bowed over them with the grave air of the days of powdered wigs.  There was not a particle of irony in the movement; rather it was a quiet acknowledgment that he recollected the good influence she had at times worked upon him in some dark days.  As he brushed her fingers with his lips, he saw.  His head came up quickly.

“Ah!”

“Yes.”  Her voice was steady and her eyes were brave.

He drew her to the lamp and studied the ring.  The ruddy lights dartled as he slowly turned the jewel around.

“It is a beauty.  No one but a rich man could have given a ring like that.  And on your finger it means but one thing.”

“I am to be married in June.”

“Do you love him?”

“I respect him; he is noble and good and kind.”

Warrington did not press the question.  He still retained the hand, though he no longer gazed at the ring.

“I have always wanted a home.  The stage never really fascinated me; it was bread and butter.”

“Is it necessary to marry in order to have a home?” he asked quietly, letting the hand gently slide from his.  “You are wealthy, after a fashion; could you not build a home of your own?”

“Always to be identified as the actress?  To be looked at curiously, to be annoyed by those who are not my equals, and only tolerated by those who are?  No!  I want a man who will protect me from all these things, who will help me to forget some needless follies and the memory that a hundred different men have made play-love to me on the other side of the footlights.”