She liked the theatre as she liked all
the arts of expression, and he had known her to go all the way to
Paris for a particular performance. Once he had gone with her--the
time she took that stupid Mrs. Mostyn. She had been struck, when he
sketched it, with the subject of his drama, and had spoken words that
helped him to believe in it. As soon as he had rung down his curtain
on the last act he rushed off to see her, but after that he kept the
thing for repeated last touches. Finally, on Christmas day, by
arrangement, she sat there and listened to it. It was in three acts
and in prose, but rather of the romantic order, though dealing with
contemporary English life, and he fondly believed that it showed the
hand if not of the master, at least of the prize pupil.
Allan Wayworth had returned to England, at two-and-twenty, after a
miscellaneous continental education; his father, the correspondent,
for years, in several foreign countries successively, of a
conspicuous London journal, had died just after this, leaving his
mother and her two other children, portionless girls, to subsist on a
very small income in a very dull German town.
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