Love's a Stage Read Online Free Page A

to being very bad.” They were walking through a circle of lamplight that glimmered on his shiny hair. “I ought to warn you that your reluctance to tell me your first name leads me to believe that you are too embarrassed to tell me. What could it be . . . Bathsheba? Armilla?”
    “It’s nothing like that.” They were separated briefly by a man carrying a giant stick of bread who shouldered his way hurriedly between them.
    “Jarita?” he asked after they were reunited by the man’s passing.
    “That is not a name!”
    “Ah, but it is. I can see you haven’t studied Hindi.”
    A certain twinkle danced in Frances’ eyes. She peeped sideways at her companion. “I confess I haven’t. Does that sink me utterly beneath reproach?”
    “Not for a moment. I’m the soul of tolerance. What have you studied? Painting? Do you know who Cooper was? That’s right, the miniaturist that Mrs. Pepys sat for. That apartment house above the coffee-seller’s was Cooper’s home.”
    Long, long ago, the surrounding nineteen acres had been the garden of the Westminster Abbey monks. The Convent Garden, folks had called it; but since, it had known a transformation to the Duke of Bedford’s garden, then into a fashionable piazza, and finally, to its current earthy and colorful incarnation. Somewhere in history’s unthinking plunge, some unsung innovator with an eye for abbreviation had shortened the obsolete name and restyled the area Covent Garden.
    The gentleman knew the area well. He entertained Frances with an enthralling walking tour of this historic place. Frances could almost see the beloved actress Nell Gwynn viewing a parade from her lodgings as the cavaliers of the Stuart Restoration saluted her from horseback. The gentleman beside her seemed to be one of the rare people who can bring history to life and turn a stroll through busy streets into an adventure. Frances began to forget her earlier caution. She had never met anyone like this man before—so charmingly animate, with such unselfconscious ease.
    It was not Miss Atherton’s habit to be easily impressed. However, by the time she had walked from the corner of Charles Street, down Russell, and over to James, she realized that he possessed a degree of erudition, wit, and education that placed him on a level of sophistication far above her own. She was not intimidated, she told herself, but as they turned the corner of Long Acre, she began to wonder why he should have taken the trouble to befriend and assist a nobody like herself, especially as she’d been less than polite to him earlier. He had said there were two reasons he had been following her on Charles Street, the first being that he was concerned about her safely reaching her destination. It was true, Frances thought, that she might have had a difficult time locating her great-aunt’s new address without him.
    “But what was the second?”
    “I beg your pardon?” he said, sending his sweet smiling glance to her.
    “The second reason you followed me.”
    He looked, if not precisely surprised, then a little curious; he studied her face as if to revise a prior impression. His eyes were bright and kind as he said:
    “Miss Atherton, surely you must know.”
    The wind’s mischievous fingers had loosened her bonnet strings. She retied them rapidly as she walked.
    “Well, I don’t. And as we’ve been walking along, it occurs to me to wonder why you would want to spend your time helping strangers around the streets, because I can see now, even if I did not at first, that you are quite a brilliant man.”
    It was his turn to be amused. “ Thank you, Miss Atherton. You honor me too much. Do you know, though, that if you continue in that vein, I will find myself revising my previous estimate on the size of your hamlet downward. Hasn’t anyone ever tried to seduce you?”
    Seduce. She knew the word, of course, but it had previously played so minute a part in her vocabulary that she was forced to think a moment to