vous aime! Ich liebe dich_!"

[Illustration: In the pros' smoking-room.]

Lily, now that the audience was good for invitations to supper, bouquets
and sweets, occupied herself with that somber mass which, formerly, did
not cause her so much uneasiness as the presence of her Pa. Lily, like a
real stage-girl, who had beheld waves miles high between Harwich and the
Hook of Holland, saw in a few flowers a bouquet large enough to fill a cab
and the least little love letter grew, in her eyes, into an offer to
present her with motor-cars and to abandon wife and child. If a gentleman,
for once in a way, stood on the pavement waiting for her, she dreamed of
an elopement. And there were pros, too, who prowled around her, in the
half light of the wings, and came up to her with outstretched hand:

"Hullo, Mrs. Trampy!"

"Call me Miss Lily," she said, in a vexed voice. "That's the name I'm
known by."

And many of them did know her, in fact, from having talked about her in
Fourteenth Street in New York, or in State Street at Sidney, or in the
theaters in South Africa, for that story of the whippings had traveled all
around the world, under the folds of the Union Jack. Some proposed to take
her with them in their show, or to go with her to clean her bike, instead
of Glass-Eye:

"Is it a bargain?"

"Yes, I _don't_ think!" said Lily.

Another, just off for Melbourne, told her that, in Australia, you could
find fire-escapes to marry you for half-a-crown. They joked without
constraint, in the pros' smoking-room, a small and dark corner between the
house and the stage.... All of them, all the pros, she had them all at her
feet; but she didn't care for that sort and she sent them all to eat
coke.

The months all passed alike. She had finished the Bill and Boom tour. She
continued in the private music-halls, from north to south, from east to
west of England. In spite of Glass-Eye's impossible cooking and the
everlasting ham sandwiches and pork-pies of the railway station
refreshment rooms, Lily grew plumper and plumper, her nervous leanness
filled out, with pigeon's eggs and ostrich's eggs everywhere, in front and
behind. She did not kill herself with work. Once, in Glasgow, at a
music-hall where, a few weeks earlier, Laurence had had a terrible fall,
lying unconscious for two whole hours, the frightened manager said:

"No dangerous tricks, mind! They only get us into trouble!"

Another time, she was given only seven minutes, w