venture a probable escape for herself from those relentless demands
upon her own scanty purse. A month later came the paragraph, in a
voluminous epistle:

"Mr. Raynor says you are to make his house your home whenever you are
free. He insists upon giving you a floor all to yourself, like a
little flat, where you can receive your friends undisturbed, and feel
you have a little home of your own. I am quite certain also that he
will try to help you in your career through his interest in the
Greenway Theatre."

If Lorraine wondered at all concerning this unknown man's interest in
her welfare she kept it to herself.

A home instead of the dingy lodgings she had grown to hate, and the
prospect of influential help, were sufficiently alluring to drown all
other reflections.

When the tour was over she went direct to Kensington, to make her home
with her mother until her next engagement. She was already too much a
woman of the world not to notice at once that her mother and her host's
relations seemed scarcely those of employee and employer, and there was
a little passage of arms between herself and Mrs. Vivian the next
morning.

In reply to a long harangue, in which that lady set forth the
advantages Lorraine was to gain from her mother's perspicacity in
obtaining such a post, she asked rather shortly:

"And why in the world should Mr. Raynor do all this for me, simply