"I wonder why you never took up opera," she inquired, in tender astonishment.

"What's the good? The British public doesn't want British singers. Oh no," he said, with a glance full of reproach for the indifference of the sky, "I'm not fat enough for opera."

He went up the tonic scale to "la," frightening away some small sea-birds that had just alighted on the gleaming sand by the tide's edge.

"Let me hear your voice," he asked, abruptly.

Dorothy was gratified by this request. She had taken for granted the tenor's interest in her appearance, but that this should extend to her voice seemed to indicate something more profound than a casual attraction. She a.s.sured him that she was too shy, but he continued to persuade her, and at last she sang a part of one of the leading lady's songs.

"Yes, it would be worth while taking some trouble with it," he judged.

"If you like I'll give you lessons. Have you got a piano in your rooms?"

"We have got a piano this week, as it happens," said Dorothy, "though I should doubt if it had ever been played on. Come to tea this afternoon, and we'll try it."

"You live with that Haden girl, don't you?"

"Do you think she's pretty?" Dorothy asked.

The tenor shrugged his shoulders.

"Oh yes, so-so. I really haven't noticed her much. She dyes her hair, I suppose."

"No, it's natural," said Dorothy, resisting the temptation to insert a qualifying, "I believe."

They discussed the varieties of feminine beauty; when the tenor had managed to convey without direct compliments that Dorothy had every feature a woman ought to have, she was convinced by his good taste that her voice must be out of the ordinary.

"Good gracious! It's past two o'clock," she exclaimed, at last, when her appet.i.te began to a.s.sert itself in spite of ozone and flattery. "How time flies!"

"_I_ dine at half past two. We'd better be strolling back."

It was after that hour when they reached Aberdeen, because David Bligh was continually stopping on the desolate roads that led across the low-lying lands between the city and the sea to ill.u.s.trate with s.n.a.t.c.hes of song many episodes of his adventurous life as an actor in musical comedy. Dorothy might have been bored by all this talk about himself if he had not made it so clear that he really did admire her; as it was, she a.s.sented warmly when he murmured, outside her lodgings:

"How quickly one can make friends sometimes!"

How quickly, indeed, when a man will show his admiration with his eyes and a woman with her ears.

The others had not returned from their expedition along Deeside when tea was finished, so Dorothy and the tenor took down the photographs and china ornaments from the top of the piano, and presently an unfamiliar sound brought in Mrs. Maclachlan, the landlady, to say that the piano had not been used since her eldest daughter died ten years ago, and that she would prefer that it was not used now. This was the kind of occasion on which Dorothy missed Sylvia, who would have known how to deal with the old woman; but David Bligh, without heeding her protests, continued to strum. Mrs. Maclachlan at once put the ba.s.s clef out of action by sitting down upon the notes, where, with arms akimbo, she maintained her position and poured forth a torrent of unintelligible Scots l.a.b.i.als.

Dorothy, horrified at the idea of a brawl with a woman who, even if she did let rooms, obviously belonged to the servant cla.s.s, begged the actor not to play any more. In the end he agreed to resign from the contest with Mrs. Maclachlan on condition that Dorothy would try her voice on the piano in his rooms, where he was so encouraging about its quality that she gave herself up to serious study, one result of which was that henceforth she always had the second bedroom to herself, because her voice seemed to require most exercise when Sylvia and Lily required most sleep. The other girls in the company showed no inclination to believe that Dorothy's friendship with David Bligh was founded upon his skill in voice-production and they used to declare with conscious virtue that such singing-lessons were merely an excuse for making love.

"Be careful, dear, with Bligh," Fay Onslow warned Dorothy. "He's known all over the road for the way he treats girls. Look at May Seymour!

Really, I'm quite sorry for the poor thing. I'm sure she's beginning to look her age."

This was good news about May Seymour, who had ignored her when she joined the company; but though in other respects the leading lady's fate might serve as a warning, Dorothy was much too secure of herself to need any advice about David Bligh. To be sure, he had several times seized the opportunity of examining his pupil's throat to kiss her, but she had accepted the kisses with no more sense of their reality than if they had been a doctor's bill, which in a way they were. However, Dorothy was not accustomed to let herself be over-charged, and these kisses were the only honorarium Mr. Bligh ever got. He was so much piqued by her indifference that he mistook for a grand pa.s.sion the mortification set up by his failure to get her hopelessly in love with him, and he made such a complete fool of himself over Dorothy that the girls of the company were more annoyed than ever, and from having at first been charitably anxious about her virtue they now became equally severe upon her cruelty.

"The poor boy's getting quite thin," Fay Onslow declared. "You really oughtn't to treat him like that. It's beginning to show in his acting."

Dorothy consulted Sylvia about David Bligh's decline, not because she cared whether he was declining or not, but because it was an excuse to talk about herself.

"Serve him right," said Sylvia.

"But I shouldn't like to think that he was really suffering on my account."

"Lily and I are the only people who really suffer," said Sylvia.

"What do you mean?"

"My dear Dorothy, _we_ have to listen to the practising."

"You don't really mind my practising, do you?"

"I get rather bored with it sometimes."

"Yes, I suppose it is rather boring sometimes."

Dorothy decided that it was also rather boring of Sylvia to switch the topic from her effect on David Bligh to the slight annoyance her practising might sometimes cause her friends. However, she forgave her by remembering that Sylvia had not the same inducement as herself to study singing.

Meanwhile, Dorothy's occupation of the leading man left Lily free to develop her deplorable taste for chorus-boys, and Dorothy found that her own habit of practising scales in the morning and going out for walks with David Bligh in the afternoon had resulted in continuous tea-parties at their rooms, to which, whenever she wanted to stay at home in the afternoon, she was most unfairly exposed. She might have put up with Lily's behavior for the rest of the tour if at last a moment had not come when it inconvenienced her personally. At Nottingham, which the company reached in mid-April, the weather was so fine that Dorothy accepted an invitation from an admirer in the front of the house to go for a picnic on the river Trent. Until now she had discouraged all introductions effected by the footlights, and she often marveled to Sylvia at the way other girls accepted invitations to private houses without knowing anything about their hosts. Perhaps she was already beginning to feel that David Bligh had taught her all he knew about voice-production, or perhaps the exceptionally smart automobile grumbling outside the stage-door struck her as a proper credential, or perhaps these April airs were irresistible.

"Really, you know, Sylvia," she said, "I think it would be rather fun to go. But I'm shocked at myself for suddenly breaking my rules like this.

I wonder why I am breaking them. It must be the spring."

"The what?" repeated Sylvia.

"The spring," said Dorothy, hoping she did not look as affected as she felt.

"If you had said the springs," said Sylvia, "I would have agreed with you."

The owner of the car was the spoiled son of a rich lace manufacturer, and, according to the stage-door keeper, famous in Nottingham for his entertainment of actresses. What seemed more important to Dorothy was that he had just arrived from Cambridge for the Easter vacation, which decided her to accept his hospitality.

"You'll bring two friends?" suggested the young man.

"I'll bring the two girls with whom I share rooms."

"Topping!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, and with a sympathetic tootle of satisfaction the champing car leaped forward into the night.

"You can't come to-morrow?" gasped Dorothy, when with much graciousness she had advised Lily of the treat in store for her.

"No; I've promised to go with Tom to Sherwood Forest."

"Never mind, Maid Marian," said Sylvia. "We shall get along without you.

If you see the ghost of my namesake Will in the greenwood, give him my love."

Dorothy was too angry to speak, and her resentment against Lily was increased next morning when the big car arrived with three young men, one of whom would have to spend an acrobatic day balancing himself on tete-a-tetes. Nor was the picnic a great success; early in the afternoon it came on to rain, and anything more dreary than the appearance of the river Trent was unimaginable.

"Never mind," said the host, "you'll have to come up to Cambridge; we'll entertain you properly there."

Apart from the rain which spoiled her hat, and the absence of Lily which ruined any intimate conversation about herself, Dorothy was chiefly upset by the contemptuous way in which these young Cambridge men referred to the leading man.