Now Aubrey Cooke had noted well, without appearing to remark it, the expression of pain and anxiety which passed over Annie’s face as he mentioned that Colonel Richardson was always at Mrs. Falconer’s. But not having the least suspicion that she herself knew the popular beauty, he misunderstood the cause of her distress, and connected it with the fact of the meeting he and Gibson had seen a little way from the stage-door some nights before; and he wondered whether she knew that Colonel Richardson was married, and whether she had heard certain old scandals connected with his name. For the first few weeks of the tour Aubrey saw very little of Miss Langton. She had taken his advice and drawn back, as civilly as she could, from the proposal of living with Miss West, whom she soon found out to be a coarse woman of not too reputable life, whose beauty and a certain rough good-humor made her dangerous to many men. She saw through the motive of Annie’s shyness at once, and said, with a laugh: “I suppose I am not good enough for you, little Puritan?” But she showed neither anger nor bitterness about it, and was consistently kind, after her fashion, all the time the tour lasted, to the quiet little girl to whom she had taken a capricious liking. So that Annie could not help a sneaking liking for her, especially as Miss West showed, in parts requiring dramatic power, a rough force which in some scenes kept Annie spell-bound in the wings watching her, and asking herself if this were not genius. And then Miss West would destroy the illusion by coming off at the side, scolding the prompter for not being at his post, and calling for stout or for brandy and water. Annie, therefore, chose to live alone, the only girl of her own standing in the company being the amateur chambermaid, who was so ostentatiously poor and aggressively economical that Miss Langton felt that life with her would be a sort of voluntary martyrdom. She had some trials with lazy landladies, extortionate landladies, maids-of-all-work who did not give her enough attention, and others who gave her too much. They had been traveling some weeks, when, in a certain town which is one of the oldest in England, she got into some lodgings where the landlady was always out, and, being a lone widow who kept no servant, sometimes left her lodgers to wait upon themselves more than was meet. Aubrey Cooke had rooms above Annie’s in this house, and, on reaching the door, tired, hot, and hungry after a long rehearsal of a piece which had just been added to their repertory, Annie found her fellow-lodger kicking the paint viciously off the inhospitable portal. “It is of no use, Mr. Cooke,” said Annie, resignedly. “The stupid old woman has gone to market, and we shall have to wait till she comes back, unless we go and hunt her up where she is making her bargains in stale cabbages.”