ed! Oh, no;
it's only a rumor."

It had been arranged by Madame Aldavini that Jenny, on her return from
Dublin, should join the ballet of the opera at Covent Garden.
Unfortunately her first appearance in London had to be postponed for a
year owing to the fact of there being no vacancy. Jenny was
disheartened. It was useless for Madame Aldavini to assure her that the
extra year's practice would greatly benefit her dancing. Jenny felt she
had been practicing since the world was made. She continued to practice
because there was nothing else to do, but time had quenched the fire of
inspiration. She was tired of hearing that one day she might, with
diligence and application, become a Prima Ballerina. She knew she was a
natural dancer, but Terpischore having endowed her with grace and
lightness and twinkling feet, left the spirit that could ripen these
gifts to some other divinity. She had, it is true, escaped the doom of
an infant prodigy, but it might have been better to blossom as a prodigy
than to lie fallow when the warmth and glory of the footlights were
burning without her.

Meanwhile Hagworth Street had not changed much in seventeen years. The
tall plane-tree at the end was taller. The London County Council, not
considering it possessed any capacity for decoration, had neglected to
lop off its head, and, as there was no other tree in sight, did not
think it worth the trouble of clipping to an urban pattern. Year by year
it shed its bark and, purged of London vileness, broke in May fresh and
green and beautiful. In October more leaves pattered down, more leaves
raced along the gutters than on the night of Jenny's birth. The gas-jets
burned more steadily in a mantle of incandescent light. This method of
illumination prevailed indoors as well as outside, shedding arid and
sickly gleams over the front-parlor of Number Seventeen, shining, livid
and garish, in the narrow hall. The knob was still missing from the
bedstead, and for seventeen years Charlie had promised to get a new one.
Charlie himself had changed very slightly. He still worked for the same
firm in Kentish Town. He still frequented the "Masonic Arms." He cared
less for red neckties and seemed smaller than of old. Yet he could drink
more. If his hair was thinner, his eyebrows, on the other hand, were
more bushy, because he blew off his old ones in the course of an
illustrated lecture on the management of gas-stoves. For the constant
fingering of his ragged mo