-door neighbour who happens to
be doing the same thing. At first this communication was purely in the
region of the mind, without so much as the movement of an eyelid on
either side, and that made it all the more intimate and intense. But
to sit there Sunday evening after Sunday evening, when the other
boarders were at church, both looking at the same plane-tree opposite,
or the same tail-end of a sunset flung across the chimney pots,
without uttering a syllable or a sound, was at last seen by both in
its true light, as a thing not only painful but absurd. So one evening
the deep, full-hearted silence burst and flowered into speech. In
common courtesy Mr. Rickman had to open his lips to ask her whether
she objected to his smoking (she did not). Then it came to
acknowledging each other in the streets; after that, to Poppy's coming
out and looking over the balcony about the time when Mr. Rickman would
be coming home from the shop, and to Mr. Rickman's looking to see if
Poppy was looking; and so on, to that wonderful night when he saw her
home from the Jubilee Theatre. The stars were out; not that Poppy
cared a rap about the stars.

Her first appearance to-night was in the character of a coster-girl, a
part well suited to her audacity and impertinent prettiness. Poppy was
the tiniest dancer that ever whirled across a stage, a circumstance
that somewhat diminished the vulgarity of her impersonation, while it
gave it a very engaging character of its own. Her small Cockney face,
with its impudent laughing nose, its curling mouth (none too small),
its big, twinkling blue eyes, was framed in a golden fringe and side
curls. She wore a purple velveteen skirt, a purple velveteen jacket
with a large lace collar, and a still larger purple velveteen hat with
white ostrich feathers that swayed madly from the perpendicular.

The secret of Poppy's popularity lay in this, that you could always
depend on her; she always played the same part in the same manner; but
her manner was her own. To come on the stage quietly; to look, in
spite of her coster costume, the picture of suburban innocence, and
pink and white propriety; to stand facing her audience for a second of
time, motionless and in perfect gravity--it was a trick that, though
Poppy never varied it, had a more killing effect than the most
ingenious impromptu.

"Sh--sh--sh--sh!" A flutter of programmes in the pit was indignantly
suppressed by the gallery. There was a movement of P