others, told me
that he was only flirting, and that I had better turn my attention to
somebody else. Somebody else! As if any one were worth even looking
at after Jack Curtis. I pitied every girl who was not engaged to him.
How could my sisters be happy? Resigned, content, they might be; but
to be married and done for, and afterwards to meet Jack--well,
imagination failed me to depict the awfulness of such a calamity.

It was quite time he spoke--there can be no doubt of that; although
Jack Curtis was too charming to be bound by the rules which govern
ordinary mortals. Still, I could not help feeling uneasy and
apprehensive. How could I tell how he carried on at those gay and
festive scenes in which I was not included? A proud earl's lovely
daughter might be yearning to bestow her hand upon him. A duchess
might have marked him for her own. Possibly my jealous fears
exaggerated the importance of the society in which he moved, but it
seemed to me that if Jack had been bidden to a friendly dinner at
Buckingham Palace it was only what might be expected.

Well, there came a night when we expected Jack to supper and he
appeared not. Only, in his place, a few lines to say that he was
going to start at once for his holiday. A friend had just invited him
to join him on his yacht. He added in a postscript: "I will write
later." He did _not_ write. Hours, days, weeks passed, and not a word
did we hear. "It is a break-off," said my mother consolingly. "He had
got tired of us all, and he thought this the easiest way of letting
us know. I told you there was an understanding between him and Isabel
Chisholm--any one could see that with half an eye."

I turned away shuddering.

"Terrible gales," said my father, rustling the newspaper comfortably
in his easy chair. "Great disasters among the shipping. I shouldn't
wonder if the yacht young what's-his-name went out in were come to
grief."

I grew pale, and thin, and dispirited. I knew the ladies of our
company made nasty remarks about me. One day I overheard two of them
talking.

"She never was much of an actress, and now she merely walks through
her part. They never had any feeling for art, not one of those
Gascoigne girls."

No feeling for art! What a low, mean, spiteful, wicked thing to say.
And the worst of it was that it was so true.

I resolved at once that I would do something desperate. The last
piece brought out at our theatre had been a "frost." It had dragged
along u