he was alone in the world, without kith
or kin, and might be fairly allowed to please himself, and pleasing
himself in this case meant leading to the altar, or rather to the
Registry Office, Miss Bella Blackall, music-hall singer and step
dancer.

It was unquestionably a case of love at first sight. The girl was
barely seventeen, and her girlishness attracted him quite as much as
her beauty, which was exceptional. There was nothing meretricious
about it, for as yet she owed nothing to art--brown hair, warm lips,
soft blue eyes, and a complexion like the leaf of a white rose--a
woman blossom. Then, too, she was a happy creature, full of life and
happiness and bubbling over with childish merriment--no one could
help liking her, he told himself, but it was something warmer than
that. What makes the difference between liking and love? It is so
little and yet so much. There was an air of refinement about her,
too, which to his fancy seemed to protest against the vulgarities of
her surroundings. He thought he could discern the stuff that meant an
actress in her, and prophesied that she would before long be playing
Juliet at the Haymarket. He was still at the age when the habit is to
discover geniuses in unlikely places, especially when the women are
pretty. He raved about her when he adjourned with his companions to
the bar, and they chaffed him a good deal to his face and sneered at
him behind his back. He was there the next night, and the night,
after and by-and-by he managed to get introduced to her.

She was prettier off the stage than on, and her manner was charming,
and her voice delicious with its racy accent.

She was an American, and had been in London only a few months; and he
was duly taken to a second-rate lodging in a side street near the
Waterloo Road, and presented to "Ma,"--a black satined and beaded
type of the race. There was also a sister, whom, truth to tell, he
objected to more than her maternal relative, for she was distinctly
professional, not to say loud, and the little mannerisms which were
so taking in his inamorata were very much the reverse in Miss Saidie
Blackall.

Still, he told himself, he was not going to marry the whole family;
which might be true in a sense and yet might not mean the entire
independence it implied. Bella's relations must, if he made her his
wife, mean more or less to him.

However, youth is sanguine, and Jack Chetwynd did not look too
closely at the thorns which hedged