nd Opera-Houses
and Grand Theaters, too, for there were not only "artistes," but singers,
actresses, "chicken-necks," "woolly-legs," who rubbed shoulders with the
muscular acrobats. All of them crowded round the booking-office; they
handed in professional cards, helped one another, among pros; those who
were traveling alone borrowed tickets to enable them to get their
over-weight luggage labeled: complicated pieces of apparatus,
nickel-plated rods wrapped up in sacking, equilibrists' perches; the
coaches, which were carried by assault, were encumbered with hand-luggage,
bags, parcels, picture-frames containing photographs for the doors of the
theaters, heaped up in the racks, under the seats, in the corridor; and
there was a constant fire of "Hullo, girls! Hullo, boys!"

The Three Graces, standing before the carriage-door, now that their things
were settled, watched this tumult sadly, especially Thea. What was it?
Nunkie's absence? No, but poor Lily had been kicked out by her husband, so
they heard, and turned out by her mother as well: was it possible? Lily
was dead or vanished, they didn't know which; they were told about it at
the theater; a stagehand had met her near St. Martin's Lane, in a small
street, with her hair undone and her hat on the back of her head, crying,
biting her handkerchief, drunk, apparently, and running in the direction
of the Thames. And, since then, they had had no news of her.

"Poor Lily, what can she have done, what can have happened?" sighed Thea.
"Poor Lily, she was always so nice!"

Thea could have cried for sadness.

The start caused a diversion. The collector punched the tickets:

"Blackpool? Glasgow?"

The Three Graces stepped in, the engine whistled. But a porter rushed
past, pushing before him, with a rumbling like thunder, a huge trunk on a
barrow. Thea turned her head and a name in scarlet letters caught her
eyes: "Miss Lily!" And, running after the trunk, magnificently bedecked,
in a hat all feathers and gold tassels, who? What? Lily! Lily herself, red
and out of breath, leading her bike with one hand, carrying an umbrella in
the other, and Glass-Eye, her arms stretched wide with parcels, following
in her train! Just time to throw her bike to the porter in the luggage-van
and quick, quick, Lily came scudding back, hustled along by the
train-master! She would have missed the start, were it not for Thea, who
opened the door and, with her arms of steel, gripped her as she passe