"Why, Bessie," he exclaimed, amazed, "you are going to cry!"
On the instant two tears trickled from the dark lashes and gleamed for a moment like solitaire diamonds in the setting of two ruby spots that had gathered unaccountably upon her upturned cheeks.
Bessie's expression never changed, but her smooth, round chin nodded a trembling and unabashed assent. A sudden impulse seized John. The position of his arms shifted.
"Bessie!" he murmured feelingly, "I am going to kiss you!"
Bessie did not appear half as surprised at this announcement as Hampstead at himself for making it.
The expression of devotion in Bessie's swimming orbs remained unstartled, her pose unaltered. Only her lips moved while she breathed a single word: "Yes."
Instantly their ruby and velvet softness yielded to the pressure of John's, planted as tenderly and chastely as was his thought of her,--for that other discovery that he was on the verge of making had been fended off by the coming of the tear.
That night, according to programme, John went back to Los Angeles; and a few weeks later, also according to programme, he was again in San Francisco, no longer a railroad man, but--in his thought--an actor.
Now calling oneself an actor and being one are quite different; but it took an experience to prove this to John. Even the opportunity for this experience was itself hard to get. It was days before he even saw a theatrical manager, weeks before he met one personally, and a month before he got his first engagement.
When he talked of the drama to actors the way he had talked of it to the Reverend Charles Thompson Campbell, they did not comprehend him; when he talked to them as he had to Scofield, they smiled cynically; when he admitted to one manager that he was without professional experience, the admission drew a sneer which froze the stream of hope in his breast.
John thereafter told no other manager this, but learned instead the value of a "front", and inserted in the professional columns of the _San Francisco Dramatic Review_ a card which read:
+------------------+ | | | JOHN HAMPSTEAD | | HEAVY | | AT LIBERTY | | | +------------------+
"Heavy" in theatrical parlance means the villain. Modestly confessing himself not quite equal to "leads", though in his heart John scorned to believe his own confession, he had announced himself as a "heavy."