During the three weeks which elapsed between the two expeditions of the 'Sunday League,' Kendal saw Miss Bretherton two or three times under varying circumstances.

One night he took it into his head to go to the pit of the _Calliope_, and came away more persuaded than before that as an actress there was small prospect for her.

Had she been an ordinary mortal, he thought the original stuff in her might have been disciplined into something really valuable by the common give and take, the normal rubs and difficulties of her profession.

But, as it was, she had been lifted at once by the force of one natural endowment into a position which, from the artistic point of view, seemed to him hopeless.

Her instantaneous success--dependent as it was on considerations wholly outside those of dramatic art--had denied her all the advantages which are to be won from struggle and from laborious and gradual conquest.