Miss Pritchard acknowledged to herself that Elsie Marley had the right stuff in her. She did not grow careless, never let herself down. The audience was uncritical and wildly demonstrative, but the girl did her level best at every performance. Up to a certain point, she even improved. The possibility of so doing in this case was limited, but having reached that point she held it. Further, her wonderfully sweet voice seemed to grow sweeter every day.

Therein lay Miss Pritchard’s one hope. Presently, she sought out an old friend who had been a musician of note and later a teacher and musical critic on an evening paper, and confided her difficulty to him. Hearing her story, he was interested and very sympathetic. He advised her to drop the concert idea and dwell wholly upon the possibility of opera as a lure: only the dramatic form and setting could compete successfully in a case of stage-fever like that. And where Miss Pritchard had hoped only to be allowed to bring Elsie to him, he being an old man, he agreed to go to the theatre and hear the girl when she would be off her guard.

“I’ll go any night you say, Miss Pritchard,” he proposed.

“Don’t make me choose, Mr. Francis,” she begged. “There’s so much at stake that if I knew when you were to be there, I should be so nervous I couldn’t sit still.”

“You nervous, Miss Pritchard!” he exclaimed incredulously.

“Alas, yes, Mr. Francis,” she acknowledged, laughing. “These young people with their careers are too stimulating for spinster cousins who have never had anything more exciting than night-work on a city paper. Well, I dare say I have only my come-uppings. You see, I was afraid Elsie wouldn’t be lively enough! I had visions of an extremely proper, blase young person moping about, and rather dreaded her. Getting Elsie was like finding a changeling.”

“Rather too much of a good thing? Well, we’re all that way, Miss Pritchard. If we’re looking for a quiet person, we want a peculiar sort of quietude; and the lively ones must be just so lively and no more. Do you remember in one of the old novels, where a sister enumerates in a letter to her brother the charms of the young lady she wishes him to marry? At the end of the list she adds that the lady has ‘just as much religion as my William likes.’ Now isn’t that human nature and you and I all over?”

As she left the house, a suggestion came to Miss Pritchard in regard to a lesser matter she had had in mind. Elsie having agreed to drop everything for July and August and go into the country with her, she had been studying prospectuses and consulting friends as to the whither. Seeing Mr. Francis, suddenly recalled a summer twenty years before when he and his sister had passed a month at a place called Green River in eastern Massachusetts, and she had driven over a number of times from a neighboring town to dine with them. It came to her suddenly that Green River was exactly the place she had been looking for, and she believed it must be near Enderby, where Elsie’s friend lived. And now she couldn’t understand why she hadn’t thought before of going where the friends might meet.

Making inquiries, she discovered that the name Green River had been changed to Enderby, and that Enderby Inn was considered quite as good a hostelry as the Green River Hotel had been. She wrote at once to the proprietor to see if she could engage rooms, saying nothing to Elsie lest the plan miscarry.

So eager was she, that when she found a telegram on her plate next morning (almost before her letter had left New York) she opened it anxiously, uncertain whether such promptness meant success or failure for her. But it was from Mr. Francis, asking her to lunch with him. She got through the morning in almost a fever of suspense.

He had gone to hear Elsie that very night of Miss Pritchard’s call, and told her without preface that the girl had a marvellous voice.

“Now, Miss Pritchard, can’t you shut down at once on that vaudeville business and set her to studying under a first-rate teacher?” he demanded. “She ought not to lose a minute. Of course she is rather small too bad she isn’t taller but for all that I believe such a voice will carry her anywhere. I shouldn’t wonder if she should turn out a star of the first magnitude.”

He named a teacher with a studio in Boston who could take her as far as she could go in this country. He usually went to Naples in the late spring with a pupil or two, but would be at his home near Boston all summer this year.

Of course the fact that Enderby was within easy reach of Boston added to Miss Pritchard’s excitement. That night she received word that she could have accommodations at the inn, and a letter following next day offered her a choice of rooms. She engaged a suite of three with a bath, though aware that the single rooms would be satisfactory. And she smiled at herself for assuming airs already, as guardian of an operatic star, engaging royal apartments for her.

Filled with enthusiasm, she announced to Elsie that night that she had secured quarters for them at Enderby for the two months. At the first breath the girl was quite as surprised and delighted as she was expected to be. The delight was, it is true, but momentary, though it sufficed to irradiate her face and fill Miss Pritchard’s heart with generous joy also, to hide from the latter the fact that it was succeeded by profound dismay.

Those dimples! Those awful dimples! As she thought of them, Elsie Moss was overwhelmed by consternation. Of course she couldn’t go to Enderby. She couldn’t let Uncle John get even a second glimpse of her face. She fled from the room in a panic which Miss Pritchard believed to be excited eagerness to impart the good news to her friend at once.

Though, as the days had passed, Elsie had persisted in her refusal to face her conscience or look into the future, she had been vaguely aware of a day of reckoning ahead. She had dimly taken it for granted that when she stopped she would have to consider there would be nothing else to do. When she should be out from under the influence of this powerful stimulant, she foresaw herself meeting perforce the questions she had evaded. But also she had foreseen herself with two clear months before her and with Cousin Julia beside her.

Now, on a sudden, all was changed. She seemed to have no choice. She had no control over her future. She had delayed so long that the choice was no longer hers. Her path was sharply defined. There was nothing she could do except to disappear on the eve of Miss Pritchard’s departure for Enderby. And at that time there would be nothing to sustain her, no moral or redeeming force about an act that was compulsory. It was like being shown a precipice and realizing that at an appointed time one must walk straight over its verge.