nurse--of
one little wonderful child. Had this been granted her, it is probable
that the maimed and the halt would have had less attraction for her
pitying imagination. As it was, however, she persuaded herself that she
loved them. Was it because, at the moment, no one else seemed to
need her love?

CHAPTER XXXVII

STAGE WAITS, MR. LAFLIN

Esther's impatience was to be appeased, perhaps a little to her regret
after all, by an unexpected remission of the time appointed between Mike
and his first real engagement. Suddenly one day came an exciting letter
from the great actor, saying that he saw his way to giving him a part in
his own London company, if he could join him for rehearsal in a
week's time.

Here was news! At last a foundation-stone of the new heaven was to be
laid! In a week's time Mike would be working at one of the alabaster
walls. Perhaps in two years' time, perhaps even in a year, with good
fortune, the roof would be on, the door wreathed with garlands, and a
modest little heaven ready for occupation.

Now all that remained was to make the momentous break with the old life.
Old Mr. Laflin had been left in peaceful ignorance of the mine which
must now be exploded beneath his evening armchair. Mike loved his
father, and this had been a dread long and wisely postponed. But now,
when the moment for inevitable decision had come, Mike remembered, with
a certain shrinking, that responsibility of which Dot had spoken,--the
responsibility of being a man. It was his dream to be an actor, to earn
his bread with joy. To earn it with less than joy seemed unworthy of
man. Yet there was another dream for him, still more, immeasurably more,
important--to be Esther's husband. If he stayed where he was, in slow
revolutions of a dull business, his father's place and income would
become his. If he renounced that certain prospect, he committed himself
to a destiny of brilliant chances; and for the first time he realised
that among those chances lurked, too, the chance of failure. Esther must
decide; and Henry's counsel, too, must be taken. Mike thought he knew
what the decision and the counsel would be; and, of course, he was
not mistaken.

"Why, Mike, how can you hesitate?" said Esther. "Fail, if you like, and
I shall still love you; but you don't surely think I could go on loving
a man who was frightened to try?"

That was a little hard of Esther, for Mike's fear had been for her sake,
not his own. However,