the stage
for six years, without the slightest idea of ever going back. I left it
without regret. And I was very happy, leading a quiet, domestic life in
the heart of the country. When my two children were born, I thought of
the stage less than ever. They absorbed all my time, all my interest,
all my love.

IV

A SIX-YEAR VACATION

1868-1874

My disappearance from the stage must have been a heavy blow to my father
and mother, who had urged me to return in 1866 and were quite certain
that I had a great future. For the first time for years they had no
child in the theater. Marion and Floss, who were afterward to adopt the
stage as a profession, were still at school; Kate had married; and none
of their sons had shown any great aptitude for acting. Fred, who was
afterwards to do so well, was at this time hardly out of petticoats.

Perhaps it was because I knew they would oppose me that I left the stage
quite quietly and secretly. It seemed to outsiders natural, if
regrettable, that I should follow Kate's example. But I was troubling
myself little about what people were thinking and saying. "They are
saying--what are they saying? Let them be saying!"

Then a dreadful thing happened. A body was found in the river,--the dead
body of a young woman very fair and slight and tall. Every one thought
that it was my body.

I had gone away without a word. No one knew where I was. My own father
identified the corpse, and Floss and Marion, at their boarding-school,
were put into mourning. Then mother went. She kept her head under the
shock of the likeness, and bethought her of "a strawberry mark upon my
left arm." (_Really_ I had one over my left knee.) That settled it, for
there was no such mark to be found upon the poor corpse. It was just at
this moment that the news came to me in my country retreat that I had
been found dead, and I flew up to London to give ocular proof to my poor
distracted parents that I was alive. Mother, who had been the only one
not to identify the drowned girl, confessed to me that she was so like
me that just for a second she, too, was deceived. You see, they knew I
had not been very happy since my return to the stage, and when I went
away without a word, they were terribly anxious, and prepared to believe
the first bad tidings that came to hand. It came in the shape of that
most extraordinary likeness between me and that poor soul who threw
herself into the river.

I was not twenty-one wh