There was no time for further conversation, as Hamar entered the room at that moment.

"What do you want?" he asked curtly.

Shiel told him.

"You're too late," Hamar said. "I've engaged some one. If you'd called earlier, there might have been some chance for you, as you look tolerably intelligent. But it's no use now, so be off."

As Shiel left the room he caught Lilian Rosenberg looking at him; and he saw that her eyes were full of sympathy.

The acquaintance, thus begun, ripened. She went to see his pictures, they had tea together, and they spent many subsequent hours in each other's company. And although Shiel saw in Lilian Rosenberg only a rather prepossessing girl from whom, after cultivating her acquaintance, he was hoping to learn the inner working of the Modern Sorcery Company Ltd., with her it was different.

In Shiel, Lilian Rosenberg saw the qualities she had always been seeking--the qualities she had almost despaired of ever finding--and which she had so often declared existed only in fiction. He only interested her, she argued; but she forgot that interest as well as pity is akin to love--and that where the former leads, the latter almost invariably follows.

"I don't believe you have enough to eat," she said to him one day.

"You are a perfect shadow. How do you exist if you have no private means?"

"I just manage to exist, and that is all," Shiel laughed, and he spoke the truth, his present state of semi-starvation having resulted from the untoward events, which had happened prior to his application for the post of clerk to the Modern Sorcery Company Ltd., and his subsequent acquaintance with Lilian Rosenberg.

Whilst John Martin had been ill, and he had helped at the Hall in Kings way, he had lived well. Gladys had taken care he was paid--not a big sum to be sure--but enough to keep him. But directly John Martin, in spite of Gladys's remonstrances, had resumed work, Shiel had been dismissed.

"I wish I could help you," John Martin said to him, "for I really feel grateful to you for all you have done, but to tell you the candid truth, I can't afford to pay any salaries. As you know, the receipts of the Hall are next to nothing; but the expenses continue just the same--rent, gas, and staff--all heavy items. Moreover, at your uncle's death, many of his creditors put in claims on the Firm for debts--debts he had incurred without either my sanction or knowledge--and it has been a serious drain on me to pay them off. In fact, my finances are now at such a low ebb that I cannot possibly do anything for you. If only the Modern Sorcery Company could be cleared off the scenes."

"You would, I suppose, feel extremely grateful to whoever cleared them off?"

"I would," John Martin replied, with a significant chuckle.

"Even though it were some one who had not stood very high in your estimation?"

"Even though it were the devil."

"Now, look here, Mr. Martin," Shiel said, trying to appear calm. "I will devote all my energies and all my time to your cause--the overthrow of the Modern Sorcery Company, if only--if only, in the event of my being successful, you will give me some hope of being permitted to win your daughter."

"I promise you that hope, and any other you may see fit to aspire to,"

John Martin said, with a grim smile, "since there isn't the remotest chance of your succeeding in the task you have set yourself. Believe me, it will take both money and wits to get the better of Hamar, Curtis and Kelson."

"Anyhow, I have your permission to try. I shall do my best."

"You may do what you like," John Martin rejoined, "so long as you don't talk to me again about Gladys till you've redeemed your pledge, that is to say, till you've overthrown the Modern Sorcery Company. In the meanwhile, I must ask you to abstain from seeing her."

"I am afraid I can't promise that."

"Can't promise that," John Martin cried, his eyes suffusing with sudden pa.s.sion. "Can't you! Then d.a.m.n it, you must. I'm not going to have my daughter throw herself away on a penniless puppy. There, curse it all, you know what I think of you now--you're a b.u.mptious puppy, and I swear you shall not come within a mile of her."

"I shall," Shiel retorted, drawing himself up to his full height. "I shall see her whenever she will permit me--and since she is not at home at the present moment, I shall now await her return outside the house, and defy the savage old bull-dog inside it." Leaving John Martin too taken aback with astonishment to articulate a syllable, Shiel withdrew.

True to his word, he waited to see Gladys. He paced up and down the road in front of the house from eleven o'clock in the morning, when his interview with John Martin had terminated, till eight o'clock in the evening, and was just beginning to think he would have to give up all hope of seeing her that day, when she came in sight.

"Really!" she exclaimed, after Shiel had explained the situation. "Do you mean to say you have stayed here all day?"

"Of course I have," Shiel answered. "I told your father I would see you, and I meant to stay here till I did."

"And what good has it done you?"

"All the good in the world. I shall sleep twice as well for it. I'm more in love with you than you think, and I mean to marry you one day.

My prospects at present are absolutely Thames Embankmentish, but no matter, I've hit upon a capital way of ferreting out the secrets of the Modern Sorcery Company. I shall get employed by them"--and he told Gladys of the advertis.e.m.e.nt he had seen in the paper.

"Well! I wish you all success," she said, "but I'm afraid you've upset my father dreadfully, and the doctor says excitement is the very worst thing for him and may lead to another stroke. You must on no account come here again, until I give you leave."

"But I may see you elsewhere?"

"If you're a wise man, you'll do one thing at a time. You'll discover the secret of the Sorcery Company first, and then--"

"When I have discovered it?"

"My father may forgive you. Have I told you I'm going on the stage? I know Bromley Burnham, and he's offered me a part at the Imperial. It is imperative now, that I should do something to help my father."

"If you become an actress," Shiel said bitterly, "my chances of marrying you will indeed be small."

"Not smaller than they are now," Gladys observed. "_Au revoir._" And with one of those tantalising and perplexing smiles, with which some women, consciously or unconsciously, counteract--and sometimes, perhaps, for reasons best known to themselves--completely nullify the needless severity of their speech, shook hands with Shiel, and left him.

CHAPTER XVIII

STAGE THREE

The weeks sped by. Gladys Martin went on the Stage, and thanks to beauty and influence, rather than to talent--though in the latter respect she was certainly not wanting--she became an immediate success. Her photos, some taken alone, and some with Bromley Burnham, occupied a conspicuous place in all the weekly ill.u.s.trateds, and in innumerable shop windows. People talked of her as they do of all actresses. Some said her father was a broken-down peer; some, a needy parson, and some, a policeman! Some said the Duke of Warminster was madly in love with her; others that Seaton Smyth, the notorious Cabinet Minister, was pining for a divorce on her behalf, and others, that she was seldom seen off the stage--she was entertaining the King of the Belgians.

"I've met her," Lilian Rosenberg said to Shiel, as they stopped one evening to gaze at Gladys's portraits outside the Imperial Theatre.

"She came to our place to have a dream interpreted, and I thought nothing of her. I don't admire her the least bit in the world, do you?"

"I do," Shiel replied, rather sharply.

"Why, you sound quite angry," Lilian Rosenberg laughed. "One would think you knew her. I wonder if Bromley Burnham is very much in love with her! He looks as if he were in these photographs! Do you think it possible for a man and woman to make love to each other every night on the stage, like they do, without one or other of them being affected?"

"I really couldn't say," Shiel replied. "I'm no authority on such matters--they don't interest me in the least."

But this was an untruth--they did interest him--and very much, too. He seldom, indeed, thought of anything else. Had Gladys fallen in love with Bromley Burnham? Could she resist the fascinations of so handsome a man? He did not, of course, pay any heed to the gossip that coupled her name with dukes and other notorieties. He knew Gladys too well for that, but when he saw her thus photographed, clasped in the arms of Bromley Burnham, he had grave apprehensions. He longed to see her--to ask her if she were still free; but his every attempt failed. She always avoided him, and there was no other alternative save to further his scheme--his scheme for crushing the Sorcery Company--and to hope for the best.

And in these dark days of his life, when he was tormented by the yellow demon of jealousy, and at the same time endured hunger, Lilian Rosenberg was his solacing angel. Utterly regardless of appearances--she did not exaggerate when she said, "I am not conventional; I don't care twopence for Mrs. Grundy." She visited him in his garret, and she seldom went empty-handed.

"I don't want your things," he rudely expostulated, when she loaded his table with cold chicken, jellies and potted meats. "I'm not starving."

"Yes, you are," she said, "and you've got to eat all I bring you." And she made him eat. She made him, too, go for walks with her, and she insisted that he should go with her on Sat.u.r.day afternoons for long rambles in the country, knowing all the time that Kelson was eating his heart out for love of her, and prophesying all kinds of terrible happenings to himself, unless she returned his affections.

Up to this point, at all events, Shiel did not allow his friendship with Lilian to blind him to the fact that he was cultivating her acquaintance with a set object. He frequently sounded her to see how much she knew of the inner workings of the Firm, and he satisfied himself that she knew very little.