, can 'e?"

He ordered a cup of coffee. He said he was waiting for someone, and we
got to chatting about old times.

"How's Carrots?" I asked.

"Miss Caroline Trevelyan," he answered, "is doing well."

"Oh," I says, "you've found out her fam'ly name, then?"

"We've found out one or two things about that lidy," he replies. "D'yer
remember 'er dancing?"

"I have seen her flinging her petticoats about outside the shop, when the
copper wasn't by, if that's what you mean," I says.

"That's what I mean," he answers. "That's all the rage now,
'skirt-dancing' they calls it. She's a-coming out at the Oxford
to-morrow. It's 'er I'm waiting for. She's a-coming on, I tell you she
is," he says.

"Shouldn't wonder," says I; "that was her disposition."

"And there's another thing we've found out about 'er," he says. He leant
over the table, and whispered it, as if he was afraid that anybody else
might hear: "she's got a voice."

"Yes," I says, "some women have."

"Ah," he says, "but 'er voice is the sort of voice yer want to listen
to."

"Oh," I says, "that's its speciality, is it?"

"That's it, sonny," he replies.

She came in a little later. I'd a' known her anywhere for her eyes, and
her red hair, in spite of her being that clean you might have eaten your
dinner out of her hand. And as for her clothes! Well, I've mixed a good
deal with the toffs in my time, and I've seen duchesses dressed more
showily and maybe more expensively, but her clothes seemed to be just a
framework to show her up. She was a beauty, you can take it from me; and
it's not to be wondered that the La-De-Das were round her when they did
see her, like flies round an open jam tart.

Before three months were up she was the rage of London--leastways of the
music-hall part of it--with her portrait in all the shop windows, and
interviews with her in half the newspapers. It seems she was the
daughter of an officer who had died in India when she was a baby, and the
niece of a bishop somewhere in Australia. He was dead too. There didn't
seem to be any of her ancestry as wasn't dead, but they had all been
swells. She had been educated privately, she had, by a relative; and had
early displayed an aptitude for dancing, though her friends at first had
much opposed her going upon the stage. There was a lot more of it--you
know the sort of thing. Of course, she was a connection of one of our
best known judges--they all are--and she merely ac