“Don’t you worry about that.”

“But if they put some one on in my place?”

“You needn’t worry about that either.  I’ll look after you.  You know that.  If I hadn’t been crazy about you I’d have let you go a week ago.  You know that too.”

She knew the tone, knew instantly where she stood.  Knew, too, that she would not play the first night in London.  She went rather white, but she faced him coolly.

“Don’t look like that,” he said.  “I’m only telling you that if you need a friend I’ll be there.”

It was two days before the opening, however, when the blow fell.  She had not been sleeping, partly from anxiety about herself, partly about the boy.  Every paper she picked up was full of the horrors of war.  There were columns filled with the names of those who had fallen.  Somehow even his uniform had never closely connected the boy with death in her mind.  He seemed so young.

She had had a feeling that his very youth would keep him from danger.  War to her was a faintly conceived struggle between men, and he was a boy.

But here were boys who had died, boys at nineteen.  And the lists of missing startled her.  One morning she read in the personal column a query, asking if any one could give the details of the death of a young subaltern.  She cried over that.  In all her care-free life never before had she wept over the griefs of others.

Cecil had sent her his photograph taken in his uniform.  Because he had had it taken to give her he had gazed directly into the eye of the camera.  When she looked at it it returned her glance.  She took to looking at it a great deal.

Two days before the opening she turned from a dispirited rehearsal to see Mabel standing in the wings.  Then she knew.  The end had come.

Mabel was jaunty, but rather uneasy.

“You poor dear!” she said, when Edith went to her.  “What on earth’s happened?  The cable only said—­honest, dearie, I feel like a dog!”

“They don’t like me.  That’s all,” she replied wearily, and picked up her hat and jacket from a chair.  But Mabel was curious.  Uncomfortable, too, as she had said.  She slipped an arm round Edith’s waist.

“Say the word and I’ll throw them down,” she cried.  “It looks like dirty work to me.  And you’re thin.  Honest, dearie, I mean it.”

Her loyalty soothed the girl’s sore spirit.

“I don’t know what’s come over me,” she said.  “I’ve tried hard enough.  But I’m always tired.  I—­I think it’s being so close to the war.”

Mabel stared at her.  There was a war.  She knew that.  The theatrical news was being crowded to a back page to make space for disagreeable diagrams and strange, throaty names.

“I know.  It’s fierce, isn’t it?” she said.

Edith took her home, and they talked far into the night.  She had slipped Cecil’s picture into the wardrobe before she turned on the light.  Then she explained the situation.