ch distressed by the thought of May's
back as anything else. Sensitiveness to her mother's feelings had led
Jenny into wrecking her own happiness with Maurice, and even Fortune
could scarcely be so fierce as to drive her mother mad on account of the
pitiful corollary to that ruined love. Yet it might be so, and if it
were, what remorse would burden her mind everlastingly. And now it was
too late for explanations. Jenny, having felt all through her mother's
life an inability to confide in her completely, now when she was dead
developed an intense desire to pour out her soul, to acquaint her with
every detail of experience and even to ascertain if her own passionate
adventures had been foreshadowed in her mother's life.

Meanwhile, with all these potential horrors of culpable actions, there
was the practical side of the future to consider. In a week the lodgers
would return, and a servant must be found at once to help May. She
herself would do as much as possible, but most of her energy was sapped
by the theater. She wished her father had the smallest conception of
management. The death of his wife, however, seemed to have destroyed
what small equipment of resolution he possessed, and the "Masonic Arms"
received him more openly, more frequently than ever.

Jenny debated the notion of leaving the Orient and applying all her mind
to keeping house; but it was too late for her temperament to inure
itself to domesticity without the spur of something sharper than mere
pecuniary advantage. Perhaps it would be better to give up the house in
Hagworth Street and take a smaller one, where, on the joint earnings of
herself and her father, he and the two sisters could live in tolerable
comfort. Perhaps she might even accept the risk of setting up house with
May alone. But thirty shillings a week was not a large sum for two
girls, one of whom must be well dressed and able to hold her own in
company where dress counted for a good deal. The more she thought of it,
the more impossible did it seem to give up the theater. Those few days
of absence proved how intimately her existence was wrapped up in the
certainty of an evening's employment. As the time had drawn on for going
down to the Orient, she had become very restless in the quiet of home.
However much she might scoff at it, there was wonderful comfort in the
assurance of a cheerful evening of dressing-room gossip. Besides, there
was always the chance of an interesting stranger in fro