When they reached the hotel he got out and went in with her.  The hall porter was watching and she held out her hand.  But he shook his head.

“If I touched your hand,” he said, “I would have to take you in my arms.  Good-bye, dear.”

“Good-bye,” she said.  There were tears in her eyes.  It was through a mist that she saw him, as the elevator went up, standing at salute, his eyes following her until she disappeared from sight.

IV

Things were going wrong with Lethway.  The management was ragging him, for one thing.

“Give the girl time,” he said almost viciously, at the end of a particularly bad rehearsal.  “She’s had a long voyage and she’s tired.  Besides,” he added, “these acts never do go at rehearsal.  Give me a good house at the opening and she’ll show you what she can do.”

But in his soul he was worried.  There was a change in Edith O’Hara.  Even her voice had altered.  It was not only her manner to him.  That was marked enough, but he only shrugged his shoulders over it.  Time enough for that when the production was on.

He had engaged a hoyden, and she was by way of becoming a lady.  During the first week or so he had hoped that it was only the strangeness of her surroundings.  He had been shrewd enough to lay some of it, however, to Cecil’s influence.

“When your soldier boy gets out of the way,” he sneered one day in the wings, “perhaps you’ll get down to earth and put some life in your work.”

But to his dismay she grew steadily worse.  Her dancing was delicate, accurate, even graceful, but the thing the British public likes to think typically American, a sort of breezy swagger, was gone.  To bill her in her present state as the Madcap American would be sheer folly.

Ten days before the opening he cabled for another girl to take her place.

He did not tell her.  Better to let her work on, he decided.  A German submarine might sink the ship on which the other girl was coming, and then where would they be?

Up to the last, however, he had hopes of Edith.  Not that he cared to save her.  But he hated to acknowledge a failure.  He disliked to disavow his own judgment.

He made a final effort with her, took her one day to luncheon at Simpson’s, and in one of the pewlike compartments, over mutton and caper sauce, he tried to “talk a little life into her.”

“What the devil has come over you?” he demanded savagely.  “You were larky enough over in New York.  There are any number of girls in London who can do what you are doing now, and do it better.”

“I’m doing just what I did in New York.”

“The hell you are!  I could do what you’re doing with a jointed doll and some wires.  Now see here, Edith,” he said, “either you put some go into the thing, or you go.  That’s flat.”

Her eyes filled.

“I—­maybe I’m worried,” she said.  “Ever since I found out that I’ve signed up, with no arrangement about sending me back, it’s been on my mind.”