"Luckily, it is a straight make-up," she said, taking a cigarette and lighting it. "As a rule I use grease-paint, but to-night I was in a hurry and made-up dry. I want to talk. I am not on for a while, and my dress can be slipped on in five minutes. I mean to tell you as briefly as I can my history. It is your due."
Lionel made a noble gesture of dissent. "I am sure," he said chivalrously, "it is all it should have been--"
She interrupted with some acerbity. "That is not my reason. I have nothing either to excuse or condone. But as I have already put you to considerable trouble, and mean (if you are willing to help, me) to put you to still more, it is but fair that you should know all."
"I will make it as short as I can," she continued. "There is much that is strange and improbable in it, but I beg you to keep silent and forbear to question me until the end. I was born in a little village on the southeast coast. I was a twin, the other child being a sister, the replica of myself. My mother died when I was only two years old. When I was seventeen I was kidnaped by a tribe of Rumanian gipsies who wished to be revenged on my father. He had prosecuted some of them for poaching on his land. I was smuggled to the coast, and then across to the continent.
"I do not mean to waste time in lingering over details immaterial to my purpose. Were I writing a book I could fill a volume with the strange incidents of my abduction and wanderings. But as time is short I will come to the point at once. We journeyed by slow stages across the continent, and of course I was jealously guarded the whole time. My English dress was burned, my skin stained a brownish hue. Whenever observation threatened I was immured in a small black hole, made at the end of one of the caravans by a false partition. The police failed to trace me, for the gipsies had been cunning enough to stay some weeks in England after my capture to throw my relatives off the scent, keeping a strict watch upon me. So with this inadequate résumé you must realize that we have passed through Germany, Austria, Rumania, Bulgaria and Rumelia. We crossed the Turkish frontier, and I still had no plan of escape. Oh, yes! I had tried--once! The threats they used on my detection were more than enough to prevent me trying a second time.