The rehearsals were a hard trial, certainly. To stand about for three or four hours on a dark stage in the company of two or three more “ladies” who would have been scarcely refined enough for her to engage as maids, and then sometimes to be dismissed without having to go through her simple duty of walking across at the back of the scene with a shabby man who by day filled the position of a bill-sticker, was not work too exciting to leave time for some unpleasant reflection. When the piece came out things were a little better. Of the three girls who dressed with her in a large, bare room which seemed miles away, up at the top of the theater, two were illiterate but inoffensive, and the third proved to be one of the merriest little creatures who ever wished to be a great actress when nature intended her for a good washer-woman. Going home alone at night frightened her dreadfully, and she never got quite used to it. Luckily there were omnibuses which took her nearly the whole way; but the short distance she had to walk before she caught one was a nightly agony, though nobody ever took any notice of the insignificant muffled up figure. The piece was a failure, and did not run long; but she did duty again in the same humble capacity with the same companions in the comedy which followed, hoping for an opening to something more dignified and better calculated to show off her histrionic powers, if she possessed any. The opening came. It was a very small one, merely the opportunity of saying one line as a maid-servant; but the minutes before hearing her own voice for the first time in public were fraught with a terribly intense excitement which no important part in after-times ever called up in her with the same strength. It was a few nights after this ordeal that on returning from the theater she was seized, for the first time since leaving Garstone, with a longing to hear what was going on there--how her departure had been taken, and how William passed his time without her. So she wrote to her brother-in-law, giving, as the address for him to write to, that of a stationer whose shop she passed on her way to and from the theater. It was not that she mistrusted the boy’s word, or even his carefulness; but she did not wish to get him into trouble, as would certainly have been the case if any of the rest suspected him of knowing her real address. In answer she got the following letter: