oil for my bread, I am a legitimate defenceless
target for artistic criticism; but outside the precincts of the
theatre, I hold myself as sacred from the world as if I stood in
stone upon an altar behind some convent's bars, and as a lonely,
sorrow-stricken mother widowed of the father of my child, bereft of a
husband's tenderly jealous guardianship, I have a right to claim the
profound respect, the chivalric courtesy, which every high-toned,
honourable gentleman accords to worthy stainless women. Because as an
actress I barter my smiles and tears for food and raiment for my
fatherless child, it were not quite safe to imagine that I share the
pagan tendencies which appear to have smitten some of my countrymen
with moral leprosy."

The words seemed to burst forth like a mountain cataract long locked
in snow, which, melting suddenly under some unseasonable fiery
influence, falls in an impetuous icy torrent, bearing the startling
chill of winter into flowery meadows, where tender verdure sown thick
with primroses and daisies smiles peacefully in summer sunshine.

Twice the visitor half rose and essayed to speak, but that deep
steady voice bore down all interruption, and as he watched her, Mr.
Laurance just then would have given the fortune of the Rothschilds
for the privilege of folding in his own the perfect hands that lay
clasped on the marble slab.

While her extraordinary beauty moved his heart as no other woman had
yet done, the stern bitterness of her rebuke appealed to the latent
chivalry and slumbering nobility of his worldly soul. Looking upon
his flushed handsome face, interpreting its eloquent varying
expressions by the aid of glancing lights which memory snatched from
long-gone years, she saw the struggle in his dual nature, and hurried
on, warned by the powerful magnetism of his almost invincible eyes
that the melting spell of the Past was twining its relaxing fingers
about the barred gateway of her own throbbing heart.

"Trained in the easy school of latitudinarianism so fashionable
nowaday on both sides of the Atlantic, doubtless Mr. Laurance deems
his adopted countrywoman a nervous puritanical prude; and upon my
primitive and wellnigh obsolete ideal of social decorum and
propriety, upon my lofty standard of womanly delicacy and manly
honour, I can patiently tolerate none of the encroachments with which
I have recently been threatened. Just here, sir, permit a pertinent
illustration of the impertinence