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shockingly bad father to his daughter: everyone must think so. Her education had been fitful, her mode of life unsettled: she had no large circle of acquaintance, and her wardrobe was sadly inadequate to set off such beauty as nature had blessed her with; and from long mixing in male company, and that not of the best, she knew far too many curse-words. This at any rate was the opinion of such respectable people as came into their orbit — Miss Willis’s mother, for one, had voiced these very sentiments, not quite out of Caroline’s earshot. And now her father had expressed them himself, in the extremity of gloom.
    But Caroline was less severe. She could regret her father’s delinquencies without hate or blame. Besides, life with him had been an interesting experience, and that counted for much. In her father the colourful worlds of the soldier, the dandy, and the artist met, and she had glimpsed all of them. As a girl she had sat on the weighing-scales at Gentleman Jackson’s boxing-rooms in Bond Street watching the young bloods sparring with the great pugilist. At school she had shocked her teachers by singing an Italian song learnt from the lips of a buxom opera-singer with whom she had shared a backstage supper, and which was not, as she had supposed, about anything so innocent as nightingales. In her nearly twenty years she had been nourished by a very rich diet of experience compared with the bland fare served to most young ladies; and excepting the loss of her mother, she had known no enduring pain.
    Thus there was no bitterness in her, even as she regarded her father with the last veil of illusion stripped, saw him as incorrigible, and realized she must make her own way. As for his scheme of relaunching himself as an actor, she gave it a tolerant attention, listening to him read Romeo, and even accompanying him to auditions, where she took charge of the flannel with which he protected his throat and the scented gargle with which he lubricated it. ‘The voice,’ he instructed her, ‘the voice is all.’ Their new lodgings were certainly well situated for his purpose, being so close to Covent Garden and Drury Lane, and much of the neighbourhood inhabited by theatre people. But the time of year was unpropitious. It was June, when the season ended, the town emptied, and the Patent Theatres closed until September. The Haymarket stayed open for the summer, but the manager there — as Captain Fortune was informed with a firmness he judged excessive — had already contracted all the performers he could require. It was in the touring companies, preparing to sally to the provinces, the spas and the seaside watering-places, that the Captain’s best hope lay; and it was to their auditions, in fair-tents and inn club-rooms, that he repaired, with the supplementary hope that he would find people who remembered him from his first career thirty years ago.
    Here was a sorrow, however. Those members of the theatrical fraternity who would have helped him had all died. Unaccountably, the only survivors were those who had always been dead set against him.
    ‘I was popular, you see, my dear. I was a great draw, in my day. The votaries of Thespis, alas, have always been sadly prone to envy and jealousy. And they have long memories. They will never forgive you a triumph!’
    But even Captain Fortune’s sanguine temper was unequal to the series of rebuffs he met with at these auditions. Nor could the voice, which was undeniably resonant, efface the impression made as soon as he stepped on to the makeshift stage.
    ‘Can’t you disguise that limp?’ the manager called out, at the last audition.
    ‘What do you suggest, sir?’ answered her father with breezy exasperation. ‘I put a wig and moustache on it?’
    ‘Next!’
    Caroline was diverted, but she felt his humiliation — more, perhaps, than he did. And it spurred her on to making enquiries on her own account for a governess’s position.
    She had thought the matter round,