Before they left the theatre Lauretta stopped briefly at the Conyngham dressing room backstage. Through a crack of the door Leon saw the manager’s wife, still wearing her toga, but with her coarse, graying-brown hair now hanging in two long braids on either side of her head; she was seated at a table counting the receipts from the evening performance. Lauretta mentioned him by name as well as relationship and assured her employers that she should be quite safe, and that although they were going now to supper and should doubtless have much news to exchange, she would return to their lodgings in due time.

She then led them to a tavern not far from Leon’s hotel, and they supped adequately, Lauretta enjoying a winter crab gumbo, which the very black and shining-faced Negro cook dipped from a large, aromatic pot onto a bed of freshly steamed rice. Leon was content with cold ham and cheese, which he ate on toasted biscuits. They drank wine with their food, and Leon noted that Lauretta, without seeming in the least affected by it, emptied her glass faster than he, and without apology or indeed any comment at all allowed him to refill the tumbler at her plate until they were well into a second bottle.

While she ate robustly and he fiddled his victuals about his plate, only now and then taking a bite, he told her about Beulah Land, and about Sarah there: how she loved the place and how those on it loved her. He spoke of Selma and Bonard. She remembered Bonard, of course, and listened to his story attentively, then demanding to know why Bonard had not also come to Charleston to see her upon the stage, “So that I might say I have two stage-door beaux!”

That set them to laughing, and when they subsided, their hands touching their glasses in a companionable way without needing to lift them very often, Leon said, “You did not answer my earlier question, although the answer is perhaps partially given in the fact that you did not.”

She looked at him quietly.

“Douglas Savage is not one of the company,” he said.

She smiled and lifted her glass and drank from it. Setting it down, she said, “He seems to have happened to me such a very long time ago.”

“Is he no longer your husband?”