FOR Lucy Alford life’s outlook seemed very dreary after that chill day in February, when her father’s bones were laid in their last resting-place. He had not been a good father--if measured by the ordinary standard of parental duty--but he had been a kind and gentle one, and his daughter lamented him with profound regret. He had allowed her to grow up very much as she pleased, taking no pains to educate her, but suffering her to pick up such stray crumbs of learning as fell from the table of the professional crammer; but by reason of this very neglect Tristram Alford had seemed to his child the very centre of love and indulgence. And, beyond this, he had believed in her, and admired her, and sustained her fainting spirit, when the theatrical horizon was darkest--when managers were unkind, and sister-actresses malevolent--by such prophetic visions of future triumphs, and such glowing anticipations of coming happiness, as the man of sanguine temperament can always evolve from his inner consciousness and a gin-bottle. The poor child had found comfort and hope in those shadowy dreams, happily unconscious that her father’s fancies were steeped in alcohol; and now that he was gone, the hopes and dreams seemed to have perished with him. Thus it was that Lucy shrank from the idea of recommencing her theatrical labours as from a hopeless and a dreary prospect. Nor were her feelings on this subject uninfluenced by the sentiments of those two persons who were now her sole earthly friends. Laurence Desmond’s shuddering horror of the “Cat’s-meat Man,” his furtive glance at the little red-satin boots in which she was to have danced the famous comic dance so much affected of late years, had been keenly noted, and remembered with cruel pain. “How can he be so prejudiced against the profession?” she asked herself. And then she thought of Shakspeare, and of the Greek dramatists, whose every syllable and every comma had been so laboriously studied in the cramming season at Henley--and was slow to perceive that the more a man loves his Shakspeare and his Sophocles, the less indulgence is he likely to show to the “Cat’s-meat Man.” Mrs. Jerningham contemplated the dramatic profession from the stand-point of a woman who had known poverty, but had never found herself in the streets of London without an escort, or her brougham, and who had spent her life in a circle where every woman’s movements are regulated by severe and immutable laws. “How will you pursue your professional career, now that your poor papa is gone, my dear?” she asked, kindly, when she came to discuss Miss Alford’s future. “You cannot possibly travel about the country without a _chaperone_--some nice elderly person, who could take great care of you, and whose respectability would be a kind of guarantee for your safety. It is quite out of the question that you should go from town to town _without_ some such person.”