towards it He retraced his steps, caught his train, and travelled up to
London, his pulses beating 'Claudia' all the way.

CHAPTER XII

Claudia's introduction served so well that Paul was allowed to show what
he was made of in rehearsal at the Mirror Theatre, with a prospective
salary of fifty shillings a week. He had been a personage of late, and
Darco had delegated to him a good deal of his own authority. He was not
a personage any longer, and he was not altogether happy in his fall from
dignity. But Claudia was coming. He and Claudia would be in the same
house together, and playing at the same theatre. He would see her at
breakfast, at luncheon, at dinner; he would escort her from the theatre
and home again. That would be happiness enough to atone for anything.

This prophecy was not quite realized. Claudia chose to breakfast in her
own room, and she was a woman of many friends, and lunched out and dined
out so often that Paul hardly saw anything of her. The Sundays would
have been Elysian days, but ladies and gentlemen of fashionable aspect
drove to the house in handsome equipages, and spirited Miss Belmont away
to revels at Richmond and elsewhere in which Paul had no part. He moved
sadly about the house, in the streets, with no heart for study, or for
the writing of the new comedy on which his mind had been set so warmly
only a few weeks before. His old companions were travelling about the
country, meeting old friends and making new ones, and he wished himself
back amongst them many a time. He could have written to Claudia, and
have looked forward to the time when he could have met her again on
equal terms. They were not equals any longer. Miss Belmont was starred
in big type, and was leading lady, at a biggish salary; for her first
real chance had come to her, and she had charmed the town. Paul was a
walking gentleman with a part of fifty lines, and not a solitary critic
named his name.

Sometimes, but very rarely, Claudia shone upon him. On fine evenings,
and on those sparse occasions when she and Paul dined at the same table,
she would walk to the theatre and accept his escort Then, for a brief
half-hour, life was worth the living again. But there was one nightly
hour of torment. His work was over early, for he had nothing to do after
the opening of the third act of the piece then playing. He would dress
and wait in his room, and wonder whether that idiot, that dolt and fool
incomparable, Captain the