"I promise," said Henry. "Wherever I am, whatever I am doing, I will come."
"I have written to my uncle and I know he will come if he can. But he travels very much abroad, and my other uncle is in Japan. If they do not get any letter, I have no one--no one but you."
She took Henry's hand again. "Since father died I can't love any one," she said. "But I can be your friend and never forget you. I have been so long frightened now, and I am so tired and so ashamed, that I think all deeper feeling is dead.
"I only want to get home. Do you understand, and not think me false?"
Henry said, "I'm just as proud as I can be."
Then, saying very little, he took her back to Peter Street.
Meanwhile, as Henry was having his adventures, so, also was Millie having hers, and having them, even as Henry did, in a sudden climacteric moment after many weeks of ominous pause.
She knew well enough that that pause was ominous. It would have been difficult for her to avoid knowing it. The situation began to develop directly after the amateur performance of _The Importance of Being Earnest_. That same performance was a terrible and disgracefully public failure. It had been arranged originally with the outward and visible purpose of benefiting a Babies' Crèche that had its home somewhere in Maida Vale, and had never yet apparently been seen by mortal man. Clarice, however, cared little either for babies or the crèches that contain them, but was quite simply and undisguisedly aching to prove to the world in general that she was a better actress than Miss Irene Vanbrugh, the creator of her part.
The charity and kindliness of an audience at an amateur theatrical performance are always called upon to cover a multitude of sins, but, perhaps, never before in the history of amateur acting did quite so many sins need covering as on this occasion--sins of omission, sins of commission, and sins of bad temper and sulkiness. Clarice knew her part only at happy intervals, but young Mr. Baxter knew his not at all, and tried to conceal his ignorance with cheery smiles and impromptu remarks about the weather, and little paradoxes that were in his own opinion every bit as good as Oscar Wilde's, with the additional advantage of novelty. Mr. Baxter was, indeed, at the end of the performance thoroughly pleased with himself and the world in general, and was the only actor in the cast who could boast of that happy condition.