Etta read all about this in the brief days that intervened between her own return and her father's. While the woman in her rejoiced at the success they spoke of, the child failed to perceive the danger of this undue publicity or to guard in any way against it. It is true that she had been very much alarmed upon the night she fled from London; but as the weeks went by and neither word nor message reached her from Count Odin, or indeed from any of the friends she had made at the theatre, a new sense of security came to her and compelled her to delight in what appeared to be the final success of her escapade. Surely now her father would remain in ignorance of it to the end, she argued. She believed that it would be so, though whether the Etta Romney within her were really dead, she did not dare to say. The spirit of her mad desire; the passionate longing for liberty and triumph before the world; the knowledge of the rare gifts she possessed and of the future they might win for her, were these to be forever shut behind the gates of her silent house, however beautiful that house might be? She knew not. The future alone could tell her whither the voice of her destiny would call her. CHAPTER X THE ACCIDENT UPON THE ROAD Was Etta Romney dead or would the months recreate her? Evelyn believed that they would. The intolerable _ennui_ of her life at Melbourne festered the atmosphere in which such dreams as hers were born and reared. She had that in her blood which no make-believe could prison. Had the whole truth been told, it would have set her down for a gypsy of gypsies--a true child of the roadside and the caves. But the truth was just the one thing her father hid from her. "I met your mother at Vienna," he had told her once when an illness had moved him to that affectionate confidence which weakness is apt to provoke. "She was Dora d'Istran, the most beautiful woman in the city and one most run after. You are like her sometimes, Evelyn; you have her eyes and hair, and just such a manner. She understood me as no one else in the world has ever done, not even my little daughter. I married her in the face of my family and never regretted the day. She died when you were eleven months old. I live again through that hour which took her from me every day of my life."