MABEL'S PROGRESS,

BY THE AUTHOR OF "AUNT MARGARET'S TROUBLE."

BOOK VI. CHAPTER I. HOW JACK FOUND A PATRON.

MABEL'S brightest dreams of success in the
art she had chosen were more than realised.
The second character she appeared in — Beatrice,
in Much Ado About Nothing— charmed the
town. Juliet had afforded no scope for the
display of a certain buoyant playfulness of manner
which belonged to her, and which robbed the
saucy sallies of the brilliant Beatrice of all
bitterness whilst preserving their point and
sparkle. And then her tenderness and
indignation on behalf of her wronged cousin, and the
half tearful, half fiery, wholly womanly and
passionate manner in which the famous " Kill
Claudio!" was delivered, were pronounced by
the critics to be quite admirable. Mr. Alaric
Allen was in high content. His theatre was
crowded nightly; and the audiences showed no
symptoms of falling off, even though the end of
the London season was rapidly approaching.
Mabel was re-engaged for the following year at
an increased salary. Her income was already
a large one.

"I am growing quite a rich woman, mamma!"
said Mabel; and then she gave a little sigh.

Her life outside the theatre was quiet and
uneventful. She and her mother and Dooley
lived in as retired a manner in the pretty
cottage at Highgate as though Miss Bell, the
brilliant actress, the idol of the public, the
magnet that attracted admiring crowds to the
Royal Thespian Theatre night after night, were
a personage utterly unknown to them.
Opportunities were not wanting, had she been minded
to avail herself of them, of shining in society as
the lion of the season, the latest novelty, the
spoiled child of the public for the passing hour;
but Mabel would have none of this. Without any
romantically high-flown notions as to the exalted
character of her art, and regarding it chiefly, as
she did, in the matter-of-fact light of an honourable
means of employing her faculties to win a
subsistence for herself and for those dear to
her, she yet shrank from any such abasement of
her profession as would have been involved in
the acceptance of many of the invitations she
received. She resented the implied assumption
that she, who amused vacant fine ladies and
gentlemen, and cheated them into some fleeting
ghost of an emotion on the stage, would be
flattered by the honour of being permitted to
gratify their more or less impertinent curiosity
in their own drawing-rooms. Not that there
were wanting kind words and pleasant
encouragement from many persons whose rank was
their least title to respect and honour; or still
more precious opportunities of seeing and
conversing with men and women illustrious in
literature and art, the mere mention of whose
names had made Mabel's pulse beat high in the
days of her early girlhood, and had conjured up
a crowd of deathless images. Still, on the
whole, Mabel saw but little of the small great
world of London that came to gaze at her, and
criticise her, and admire her from its cushioned stalls.

"It is very odd to me, Mabel," said Mrs.
Saxelby one day to her daughter, " that you
don't seem to be a bit less shy than you were at
fifteen. Nay, upon my word, I think you are
absolutely more shy now than you were then!"

'' I think I absolutely am, mamma. But
why does that seem so very odd to you?"

"Why? Good gracious, Mabel, is it not
very odd? You, so admired and successful,
and accustomed to be the cynosure of all eyes
for so many hours night after night, is it not
very odd that you should shrink from strangers
like a bashful school-girl? To me it is
incomprehensible, I confess."

"But, mamma, do you not see that it is not
me, not my very self, whom those eyes are
gazing at in the theatre?"

"Not you? What nonsense, my love!"

"No, mamma. It is Juliet, or Beatrice, or
Imogen. I assume those characters of the
poet's imagination, or, to speak modestly, my
humble conception of those characters,
precisely as I assume my stage costume. I put
on, as it were, another individuality which
conceals me like a mask. To all that crowd of
strangers who fill the Thespian Theatre, Mabel
Earnshaw is an utterly unknown personage, I
assure you. You understand, mamma?"

Mrs. Saxelby did by no means understand.

"Umph! It is one of your fine-spun fancies,
my darling," she said, smiling placidly, with a
little self-satisfied consciousness of her own
superior common sense.

"Perhaps so, mamma," said Mabel, "but