“Why do you compel me like this? I have another reason--don’t ask me what it is!--for telling you that this cannot be.” Hammond started, and gazed at her with a new apprehension, not less than her own. He could scarcely muster up courage to put his next question. “I must ask you. You have gone too far, and I have gone too far, to draw back now.” “I cannot tell you.” “Then I shall ask your daughter herself.” “No, anything but that!” She rose to her feet, trembling. “I beg you, I ask you as a gentleman, to go, and leave us.” Hammond rose dismayed. He had taken two steps towards the door when it was thrown open and Belle Yorke stood revealed on the threshold. The notorious Belle Yorke did not look the part. People said it was her air of bright, girlish innocence, so foreign to the footlights, which was the secret of her success. When she tripped on to the stage from behind the painted side scenes, looking as if she had just come out of some rustic cottage in that far-off land called “the country,” and began singing one of her simple ballads, in a voice clear and fresh as the tinkle of a brook among the hills, they said it was the contrast with all her surroundings which caused such a thrill of emotion to go through the jaded audience. Of course no one believed that it was real innocence and real freshness. Belle Yorke was simply a little more clever than her professional sisters, and had thought out a “turn” which had the advantage of novelty; that was all. But it was very well done, so well that some quite hardened men of the world were ashamed afterwards to recall how far they had yielded to the spell. They declared that she made up better than any other woman on the stage, and that hers was the art which conceals art, except, of course, from such complete judges as themselves. Those who had met her off the stage found, to their surprise, perhaps to their disappointment, that Belle Yorke seen close at hand was very much like Belle Yorke upon the boards. She was not to be found drinking brandy in the bar while she was waiting for her turn to go on. She did not go from the music-hall to a fashionable restaurant, and sit in public with a group of male admirers round her. She was generally seen slipping out quietly and going off on foot, or, if she found herself threatened with companionship, she took refuge in a cab. There was clearly some mystery underneath such conduct, and the mystery could be of only one kind.