At first she had undertaken to share her salary with Sage. He kindly but firmly refused to accept the money. After three checks had been returned to her she accepted the situation, although she wrote to him that he was a “silly old thing” and “hoped to goodness he would see the error of his ways before long.” For two successive seasons she appeared in a Chicago theater, following long New York runs of the pieces in which she was playing, but not once did Herbert Sage go up to see her. Some of the best people in Rumley saw her, however—one of them, in fact, went three nights in succession to the theater in which she was playing and tried to catch her eye from the balcony—so it was pretty generally known throughout the town that she really had the making of a pretty fair actress in her! Finally, in one of her letters announcing a prospective engagement in London, she put the question to him: “Do you want to get a divorce from me, Herby?” His reply was terse and brought from her the following undignified but manifestly sincere telegram: “Neither do I, so we’ll stick till the cows come home. I feel like a girl who has just been kissed. Sailing Friday. Will cable. Much love.” She made a “hit” in London in the big musical success of that season. They liked her so well over there that they wouldn’t let her go back to the States. At the time of which I write she was playing her first engagement in London, and half the town was in love with her. She wrote to Herbert: “My dear, you wouldn’t believe the number of matrimonial offers I’ve had, and your hair would turn white in a single night if I was to tell you how many homes I could wreck if I hadn’t brought my conscience along with me. I am the toast of the town, as they say over here. Better than a roast, isn’t it?” While Herbert Sage forbore speaking of the vagrant Josephine to his friends in Rumley, nevertheless he preserved and re-read from time to time the mass of press cuttings that he kept safely locked away in a drawer of the bureau that once had held her cheap and meager belongings. He looked long and hungrily at the countless photographs with which she never failed to beleaguer him in his loneliness; and then there were the magazines, the pictorial sections of the newspapers and the reproductions of as many as a score of original drawings done by celebrated artists and illustrators on both sides of the Atlantic. Some of these caused him to frown and bite his lip—one in particular: the rather startling picture of a very shapely young gentleman in a mild but attractive state of inebriation caroling (by mistake, no doubt), to an irate old man in a casement window above. Morning and night she was in his prayers; and little Jane, as soon as she was able to prattle, was taught to say “and God bless and keep my mamma forever and ever, Amen!”