know London, and you
are a stranger here. Surely our advice would have been worth having,
at any rate. You might have spared yourself many useless journeys and
disappointments, and us a good deal of anxiety. Instead, you are
willing to go to a place like that where you ought not to be allowed
to think of showing yourself."

"Why not?" she asked quietly.

"The very question shows your ignorance," he declared. "You know
nothing about the stage. You haven't an idea what the sort of
employment you could get there would be like, the sort of people you
would be mixed up with. It is positively hateful to think of it."

She laid her fingers for a moment upon his arm.

"Mr. Brendon," she said, "if I could ask for advice, or borrow money
from any one, I would from you--there! But I cannot. I never could. I
suppose I ought to have been a man. You see, I have had to look after
myself so long that I have developed a terrible bump of independence."

"Such independence," he answered quickly, "is a vice. You see to what
it has brought you. You are going to accept a post as chorus girl, or
super, or something of that sort."

"You do not flatter me," she laughed.

"I am too much in earnest," he answered, "to be able to take this
matter lightly."

"I am rebuked," she declared. "I suppose my levity is incorrigible.
But seriously, things are not so bad as you think."

He groaned.

"They never seem so at first!" he said.

"You do not quite understand," she said gently. "I will tell you the
truth. It is true that I have accepted an engagement from Mr. Earles,
but it is a good one. I am not going to be a chorus girl, or even a
super. I have never told you so, or Sydney, but I can sing--rather
well. When my father died, and we were left alone in Jersey, I was
quite a long time deciding whether I would go in for singing
professionally or try painting. I made a wrong choice, it seems--but
my voice remains."

"You are really going on the stage, then?" he said slowly.

"In a sense--yes."

Brendon went very pale.

"Miss Pellissier," he said, "don't!"

"Why not?" she asked, smiling. "I must live, you know."

"I haven't told any one the amount," he went on. "It sounds too
ridiculous. But I have two hundred thousand pounds. Will you marry
me?"

Anna looked at him in blank amazement. Then she burst into a peal of
laughter.

"My dear boy," she exclaimed. "How ridiculous! Fancy you with all that
money! For heaven's sake, though,