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Then, at the end of it all, was a bed, and a woman’s voice, and quiet.

The woman was large and elderly, and her eyes were very kind. She stirred something in the boy that had been dead of pain.

“Edith!” he said.

VI

Mabel had made a hit. Unconscious imitator that she was, she stole Edith’s former recklessness, and added to it something of her own dash and verve. Lethway, standing in the wings, knew she was not and never would be Edith. She was not fine enough. Edith at her best had frolicked. Mabel romped, was almost wanton. He cut out the string music at the final rehearsal. It did not fit.

On the opening night the brass notes of the orchestra blared and shrieked. Mabel’s bare feet flew, her loose hair, cut to her ears and held only by a band over her forehead, kept time in ecstatic little jerks. When at last she pulled off the fillet and bowed to the applause, her thick short hair fell over her face as she jerked her head forward. They liked that. It savoured of the abandoned. She shook it back, and danced the encore without the fillet. With her scant chiffons whirling about her knees, her loose hair, her girlish body, she was the embodiment of young love, of its passion, its fire.

Edith had been spring, palpitant with gladness.

Lethway, looking with tired eyes from the wings, knew that he had made a commercial success. But back of his sordid methods there was something of the soul of an artist. And this rebelled.

But he made a note to try flame-coloured chiffon for Mabel. Edith was to have danced in the pale greens of a water nymph.

On the night of her triumph Mabel returned late to Edith’s room, where she was still quartered. She was moving the next day to a small apartment. With the generosity of her class she had urged Edith to join her, and Edith had perforce consented.

“How did it go?” Edith asked from the bed.

“Pretty well,” said Mabel. “Nothing unusual.”

She turned up the light, and from her radiant reflection in the mirror Edith got the truth. She lay back with a dull, sickening weight round her heart. Not that Mabel had won, but that she herself had failed.

“You’re awfully late.”

“I went to supper. Wish you’d been along, dearie. Terribly swell club of some sort.” Then her good resolution forgotten: “I made them sit up and take notice, all right. Two invitations for supper to-morrow night and more on the way. And when I saw I’d got the house going to-night, and remembered what I was being paid for it, it made me sick.”

“It’s better than nothing.”

“Why don’t you ask Lethway to take you on in the chorus? It would do until you get something else.”

“I have asked him. He won’t do it.”

Mabel was still standing in front of the mirror. She threw her head forward so her short hair covered her face, and watched the effect carefully. Then she came over and sat on the bed.

“He’s a dirty dog,” she said.

The two girls looked at each other. They knew every move in the game of life, and Lethway’s methods were familiar ones.

“What are you going to do about it?” Mabel demanded at last. “Believe me, old dear, he’s got a bad eye. Now listen here,” she said with impulsive generosity. “I’ve got a scheme. I’ll draw enough ahead to send you back. I’ll do it to-morrow, while the drawing’s good.”

“And queer yourself at the start?” said Edith scornfully. “Talk sense, Mabel, I’m up against it, but don’t you worry. I’ll get something.”

But she did not get anything. She was reduced in the next week to entire dependence on the other girl. And, even with such miracles of management as they had both learned, it was increasingly difficult to get along.

There was a new element too. Edith was incredulous at first, but at last she faced it. There was a change in Mabel. She was not less hospitable nor less generous. It was a matter of a point of view. Success was going to her head. Her indignation at certain phases of life was changing to tolerance. She found Edith’s rampant virtue a trifle wearing. She took to staying out very late, and coming in ready to meet Edith’s protest with defiant gaiety. She bought clothes too.