direction. That choice had fallen upon the stage—had been expressed to Lady Stableford—and the interview had terminated with an emphatic refusal of consent and an emphatic forbidding of further thoughts in that direction.

[40]

Sir James, now long since deceased, had been a stalwart among Nonconformists. Lady Stableford, always despising in her heart the social position of Nonconformity, had nevertheless lacked the moral courage to adopt a change of religious persuasion, and, until increasing years relieved her from the necessity of the great mental effort involved in the framing of plausible excuses for absence, continued, Sunday by Sunday, to “sit under” the long succession of electro-plated divines who held forth in the building which her husband had built,[41] endowed, and opened. To say that Lady Stableford was religious would not be accurate, because all that a lifetime of Nonconformity had endowed her with was a restriction of her mental aspect to the intolerant narrowness of the bigoted orthodoxy of her own particular brand. Hatred of the theatre, which she regarded as a forcing house of sin, was one of those fixed ideas she had absorbed and accepted. Degradation in this world and damnation in the next she believed to be the foreordained and inevitably resulting consequence of any association with things theatrical.

[41]

To the inherent inclination of Evangeline towards a theatrical career was now added not only the attraction of the forbidden thing, but also the fascination of that which has been declared to be wicked. To this composite and powerful temptation the girl succumbed. The thing was inevitable—probably[42] would have happened in any case; the happening was in all likelihood no more than precipitated by Lady Stableford’s attitude and prohibition. But these affected the relations of the two when the separation came, and caused the elder woman many a long month of pain and unhappiness, of stubborn anger, which step by step had mellowed into regret, forgiveness, and then into comprehension and keen remorse. Drilled by her loneliness the old lady at last swallowed her pride and wrote asking the girl to come back to her.

[42]

Lady Stableford had waited too long. There had been occasions, many and oft indeed, when Evangeline, cowed by the pitiful hardships in the poverty-stricken existence of the provincial travelling company in which she was striving to master her profession, would have jumped at the invitation. There had even once or twice 

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