Beatrice was for a moment overpowered. The luxury of the wonderful dressing room, with its perfect French furniture, its white walls hung with a few choice sketches, the thick rugs upon the polished wood floor, the exquisite toilet table with its wealth of gold and tortoiseshell appurtenances--Elizabeth herself, so beautiful and gracious--even a hurried contemplation of all these things took her breath away. She felt suddenly acutely conscious of the poverty of her travelling clothes, of her own insignificance.
"Won't you sit down for a moment?" Elizabeth begged, pointing to a chair by her side. "You and I must be friends, you know, for Philip's sake."
Beatrice recovered herself a little. She sank into the blue satin chair, with its ample cushions, and looked down at Elizabeth with something very much like awe.
"I am sure Philip must feel very grateful to you for having taken his play," she declared. "It has given him a fresh chance in life."
"After all he has gone through," Elizabeth said gently, "he certainly deserves it. It is a wonderfully clever play, you know ... don't blush, Mr. Author!"
"I heard the story long ago," Beatrice observed, "only of course it sounded very differently then, and we never dreamed that it would really be produced."
"Philip has told me about those days," Elizabeth said. "I am afraid that you, too, have had your share of unhappiness, Miss Wenderley. I only hope that life in the future will make up to you something of what you have lost."
The girl's face hardened. Her lips came together in familiar fashion.
"I mean it to," she declared. "I am going to make a start to-morrow. I wish, Miss Dalstan, you could get Philip to look at things a little more cheerfully. He has been like a ghost ever since I arrived."
Elizabeth turned and smiled at him sympathetically.
"Your coming must have been rather a shock," she reminded Beatrice. "You came with the idea, did you not, that--you would find Mr. Douglas Romilly?"
The girl nodded and glanced around for the maid, who had disappeared, however, into an inner apartment.
"They were always alike," she confided,--"the same figures, same shaped head and that sort of thing. Douglas was a little overfond of life, though, and Philip here hasn't found out yet what it means. It was a shock, though, Miss Dalstan. Philip was sitting in the dark when I arrived at his rooms this evening, and--I thought it was Douglas."