It would be unfair at this stage in Dorothy's career to accuse her of formulating any definite plan to win a coronet, still less of casting her eye upon Lord Clarehaven's coronet in particular; but during these sun-drenched August days she did resolve to do nothing that might spoil the fulfilment of the augury. Left to herself, and free from the criticism of friends or relations, it would have been strange if Dorothy's estimate of her own powers had not been rather heightened by so much lazy self-contemplation. One day she had met an acquaintance marooned like herself upon this desert isle of holidays, and on being asked what she was doing in London at such a season, had replied truthfully enough that she was just looking round; but she did not add that she was looking round at herself in a mirror. This cloistral felicity lasted as long as the lime-trees in West Kensington kept their summer greenery; at the end of August the leaves began to wither, the rumble of returning cabs was heard more often every day, and the first rehearsal of "The River Girl" was called. Dorothy's seclusion was over; of the girls who passed through the Vanity stage-door that August morning there was none so fresh as she. "How odd," she thought, "that only this time last year the notion of going on the stage had never even entered my head." Dorothy had paused for a moment on the threshold of the theater, and was listening while the door swung to and fro behind her and syncopated the dull beat of the traffic in the Strand to a sort of ragtime tune. How different these rehearsals were going to be from those of last year in the Lisle Street club-room, and how right she had been to escape from the provinces so quickly.