"Glad you like it," he had parried, feeling sure that she was jockeying with him for position for the clinch.

"Dennis Farraday told me that you were backing my emotional handling even more than my comedy scenes. Could you for once be playing square with me and really looking forward to my development in getting this—this rather remarkable kind of a play for me?"

"I've done my best for you for five years, Violet," he quietly answered the insult, as he looked across the empty white tables that stretched away from Violet's favorite and reserved seat in the black and gold dining-room.

"'Miss Cut-up,' for instance?"

"There were several ways to put that play across. You had your way in every particular. Mine might have succeeded," was his calm answer.

"The really amusing thing about you is that you don't at all know how little brains you have," was the polite broadside delivered him as Violet began to sip the clear coffee from her cup.

"Same to you," was the reply she received. Godfrey spoke in a good-natured tone of voice. "Now, what did you come to town to talk about—'The Purple Slipper'?"

"Why did you leave Highcliff like a thief in the night?"

"Did you read the deeds Dolph gave you when he went up to pack my personal effects?"

"Yes, thanks! I suppose you consider Highcliff the price of your freedom?"

"And cheap at that."

"Then why not turn me over to Weiner?" Violet asked in a dangerous tone of voice that made Mr. Vandeford glance around with apprehension to see who would witness the explosion if it occurred.

"I tried to buy Denny off yesterday, but you fastened 'The Purple Slipper' firmly in his head, maybe his heart, the other evening, and it would be like taking candy from a child. Maybe you can—can influence him to let go—if I give you the chance." There was something coolly insulting in his voice that told Violet he had surmised her intentions and the failure of her assault on his big Jonathan.

"Your usual impertinence! I'll get him yet, just to spite you. I'll go in and play that 'Purple Slipper' to win, and—"

"Again Miss Adair breaks in on enthusiasm for her play." Dennis Farraday's big voice boomed right at the elbows of the embattled pair. "Look who's here, Van!"

Mr. Godfrey Vandeford looked up quickly, and as quickly rose to his feet. And with one glance into slate-gray eyes behind long black lashes—eyes filled with awed, worshipful gratitude to him—his heart rose in his breast and all but flitted out upon his sleeve.

"Miss Adair, Mr. Vandeford, the producer of your play," good Dennis flourished. "And Miss Violet Hawtry! In fact, the whole happy family!"



CHAPTER III

Now, by all rules of the game, it was the prerogative of Miss Violet Hawtry to take charge of a situation in which the star of a play meets the author; but she missed her cue, and the gutter instinct within her sat dumb and dumfounded before the lady from Adairville.

"I'm charmed to meet you, Miss Hawtry," Miss Adair assured her, with a glance of such admiration and friendliness that even Violet's narrow-gage soul expanded into a variety of graciousness all its own, and she smiled back into the eyes of the young author with a radiance that had the semblance of warmth.

"And this is Miss Lindsey, whom we have chosen to support you in our play, Miss Hawtry," Mr. Dennis Farraday continued, with a glance of respectful awe at the Hawtry, which matched that given her by the author a second before and obtained for Miss Lindsey a cordial enough recognition of the introduction only slightly to frappe her instead of freezing her entirely. "We are all hungry," he added after the change of civilities.

"You are all having luncheon with me," Mr. Vandeford found his voice to say. Ignoring Violet's glance of indignation at this skilful avoidance of a climax of her scene with him, he had three extra covers laid at the corner table devoted to the services of Miss Hawtry.

"I warned you that we were hungry, Van," said Mr. Farraday, as he began to search through the menu for an article of diet safe to pour in quantities into a girl who had long been empty. "How'd rare steak and fresh mushrooms do?" he asked, and he looked away from what he was sure would be in the eyes of Miss Lindsey, and which was there.

"Wonderful!" she murmured.

"Right-o, for you and Miss Lindsey, but what about nightingales' tongues for my author?" laughed Mr. Vandeford, with an interested note in his rich voice, which caused Miss Hawtry to look at him sharply and Miss Adair to repeat the blush to such a degree that Miss Hawtry, as Miss Lindsey before her, was forced to admit that it was native and not imported. The flush did not pass unnoticed by Mr. Vandeford, as he laughed again with a question as to her nourishing.

"I want something that I don't know what the name means," calmly returned Miss Adair, with delighted excitement at the thought of adventuring into a land of strange food. "I know steak and ham and eggs and chicken and turkey."

"Will you trust me?" asked Mr. Vandeford. There was an eagerness in his voice and smile that again made the Violet glance at him and then at Mr. Dennis Farraday. The latter was beaming with mirth at the dilemma of feeding the young author who was so frankly scattering her hay-seeds on the metropolitan atmosphere. At that instant Miss Hawtry made a momentous decision.

"Trust Mr. Vandeford and you can't go wrong," she advised with peaches and cream in her voice, and for some unknown reason Mr. Vandeford would have been glad to twist the creamy throat from which issued the creamy voice. Instead, he turned, calmly summoned the head waiter, and went into a conference with him in a few very discreet words, which the rest could not hear, though there was no sign of any intention of keeping the consultation from them.

"I think it will be wonderful not to know until I taste it and maybe not then!" exclaimed the author, with another of her sea-gray, long-lashed glances of worshiping admiration at Mr. Vandeford, the eminent Broadway producer who was putting a great star into her play based on the adventures of an ancestress.

Of course the situation was dangerous to both Mr. Vandeford and his author, but who was to blame?

And the jolly, impromptu luncheon-party was not the kind of episode that could soon be forgotten by any of the guests. The unknown food for the author was served by the head waiter himself, and he refused to answer questions as to its origin or component parts, even when urged by Mr. Dennis Farraday. The expression on Miss Lindsey's face after her encounter with the steak and mushrooms, served with an exalted baked potato, was one of decided relaxation. The look of affection in her eyes as she glanced at the author who had dragged her into this food situation rivaled the suddenly rooted admiration which beamed in the eyes of Mr. Dennis Farraday and which put Miss Hawtry alertly on watch, so much so that Mr. Godfrey Vandeford was privileged to lean back in his chair behind a mist of cigarette-smoke and let his eyes gleam where they listed.

"Now tell us just how you happened to think of all the wonderful things in your play, Miss Adair, specially that dinner situation," Mr. Dennis Farraday urged. He was lighting Miss Hawtry's cigarette, to the intense, though concealed, interest and astonishment of Miss Adair of Adairville, Kentucky. He thus asked sincerely and interestedly the usual question that the unsophisticated fires at an author at the first opportunity and which the author, no matter how sophisticated, really enjoys answering.

And thereupon followed the story of the old letters in the trunk, with the mortgage only so lightly and proudly alluded to that the hearts of the listeners were decidedly touched, told by the author with the delighted enthusiasm that their sympathy warranted.

"And so you see, since it couldn't be oil-wells or gold mines it had to be the play," she ended, quoting herself in her conversation with the faithful Roger, who was at that moment following his plow with his mind on the straight furrows and his heart in New York.

"You are a precious darling, and your play must succeed!" said Miss Lindsey impulsively at the end of the recital, and then she quickly glanced at Mr. Godfrey Vandeford to see if he resented her taking this affectionate liberty with his distinguished author. She found that eminent producer not at home to her glance; he was lost in contemplation of tears that hung on the long black lashes that veiled Miss Adair's gray eyes and a little quiver that manifested itself on her red lips. Then she shook off the tears by lifting those long lashes so that she could look straight into his eyes with a smile of absolute confidence in his intention and ability to remove from her life forever all of her distress, which was alone poverty in the concrete, by being the successful producer of her wonderful play. Men of Godfrey Vandeford's type admit many strange fires and their votaries into the outer temple of their hearts, but they keep the inner shrine tightly surrounded by asbestos curtains. However, there is always one, and one only, closely guarded entrance through which the ultimate woman must slip in an unguarded moment. Mr. Godfrey Vandeford would never have thought of being on any particular guard against the author of a play in purple ribbons entitled "The Renunciation of Rosalind," but he knew almost instantly that something dire had happened to him as he sat and writhed at the thought of his plans for the extinction of that piece of dramatic art, which he had not even read. The whole sophisticated world has decided that there is no such thing as love at first sight, except the biological scientists and they know and can prove that such a thing does exist and that it is a worker of wonders. And dire pain is one of its reactions.

But all agony comes to an end and so did Mr. Vandeford's. Miss Hawtry, who had been so busy in her own mind with her own schemes that she had no time to listen to Miss Adair's, picked up her gloves from beside her final coffee-cup, and pulled the fine-meshed veil down over her beautiful, though slightly snubbed, nose as a signal for a separation of the group of feasters.

"May I motor you to your hotel, Miss Adair?" she asked very sweetly. Of course Patricia did not know that she had got in her invitation at the first signal of the feasters' disintegration, which she herself had given, for the purpose of forestalling a similar invitation from Mr. Farraday, whose Surreness she knew must be moored somewhere near. "Where are you stopping?" she asked with very little interest, and received an answer that almost upset her equanimity.

"I'm staying at the Young Women's Christian Association," calmly announced the author of "The Purple Slipper," with no sense of embarrassment in either voice or manner. "Thank you for offering to take me there, but Mr. Farraday is going to take Miss Lindsey and me to buy a hat at a place which Miss Lindsey knows of. She is going to buy one, too, now that she is going to play in our play."

"The Y. W. C. A.! Great guns!" muttered Mr. Vandeford under his breath, while the Violet leaned back in her chair and fanned herself.

Then very suddenly Mr. Vandeford sat up and looked at Miss Mildred Lindsey keenly for half a second.

"We'll have to go back to the office to get that check for Miss Lindsey before we go hat-hunting," announced good Dennis, with a calmness that made Mr. Vandeford suspect that he had met the fact of the eminent author's abiding-place before and had got used to it. "You and Miss Hawtry going over to the office, Van, or will you come with us, if she has other folderols to follow in a different direction?"

"I am to see Adelaide about my costumes for 'The Purple Slipper' at two-twenty, so must forego the pleasure of—of hat-hunting this afternoon," Violet murmured faintly. "But I know Mr. Vandeford will adore going with you." Miss Hawtry felt that safety lay in numbers, and she preferred to leave the unsophistication of Miss Adair with both Mr. Godfrey Vandeford and Mr. Dennis Farraday than with either of them alone.

"I wish I could get out after the hat, but you people must remember that I am putting on 'The Purple Slipper,' and I have to be about Miss Adair's business while old Denny buzzes about hat roses, free and equal with her," answered Mr. Vandeford. His envy, apparent in his voice, of the care-free state of Mr. Farraday was very real, though none of the others could guess its meaning. "I'll see all of you later. By!" and with a sign to the head waiter, which tied tight Mr. Farraday's purse-strings, Mr. Vandeford left them while the going was good. So determined was his exit that Miss Hawtry could not keep him back for the finish of the fight.

And Mr. Vandeford was in a mortal hurry. He had much to do and undo. He arrived at his office, three squares away, slightly out of breath.

"Did you see her, Pops?" he demanded of Mr. Adolph Meyers.

"I did, Mr. Vandeford, sir, and here is a carbon of the letter I sent her, not with any encouragement to come to New York at all," and in self-defense he handed out to Mr. Vandeford a copy of the letter Roger had delivered to Patricia among her roses and young onions and string-beans.

"Take it away," commanded Mr. Vandeford, seating himself at his desk and wildly shunting papers and letters about.

"Mr. Vandeford, sir, I am sorry for that young lady and I ask you to have a heart," Mr. Meyers ventured to say to his chief with a boldness which he himself could not understand, but with which Mr. Vandeford was strangely patient. He ended with, "It will be a nobleness for you to not produce a cold show for her, but pay a small damage sum for such a beautiful lady and call it all off."

"My God, Pops, I'd give half the 'Rosie Posie' to be able to do it! But Denny and Violet and that girl they engaged for support have already filled her full of success dope about the play, and if I call it off arbitrarily, where shall I stand with her?" Ignorance of the completeness of his own capitulation to the faith and tears in the sea-gray eyes, and the genuine, grown-on-the-spot blush from Adairville, Kentucky, showed in the consternation with which he asked the question of his henchman.

"'Stand with her'!" repeated Mr. Meyers, with a consternation that matched his chief's, but was of different origin. "You had no such fear when you called off from rehearsals in the second week the comedy of Mr. Hinkle, and a fourth of the damages paid to him will to her be—"

"Get to work under your hat, Pops, get to work! The 'Purple Slipper' has got to go on Broadway and go big. I followed that purple hunch for pure cussedness against Violet, and now watch it lead me by the nose. You get Gerald Height on the wire as soon as you can, while I talk to Rooney."

"But, Mr. Vandeford, sir, it is not a Hawtry play, and—"

"Get busy, get busy, Pops! Put a copy of that manuscript on my desk where I can lay hands on it the minute I get a chance. Get everything going for a week later than I first called the show and—"

* * * * *

"Here we are!" exclaimed Mr. Dennis Farraday, as he burst into the outer office, ushering as a wedge before him Miss Patricia Adair and Miss Mildred Lindsey. "Got that hat-check, Pops? Money, I mean, for Miss Lindsey, not a pasteboard for your own lid from some hotel."

For a minute Mr. Vandeford lost himself in the depths of the worshiping, gray eyes that seemed to have been lifted to his for all eternity in that terrible faith and gratitude. Then he went into action as captain of the ship which was to come into the port of Adairville, Kentucky, with all sails set, loaded or bearing his dead body.

"You and Miss Adair extract money from Pops with a can-opener while I discuss a few details with Miss Lindsey, in the office," he commanded coolly, ushered Miss Lindsey into the sanctum and softly closed the door.

"Mr. Vandeford," Miss Lindsey began rapidly, "I knew it wasn't fair to make any definite arrangements with Mr. Farraday, and of course I will take whatever salary you—"

"Where do you live, Miss Lindsey?" Mr. Vandeford interrupted to ask with a totally unwarranted interest on the part of a manager in the affairs of an actor he has engaged. Miss Lindsey, for the second time that day, underpainted her own cheeks and laughed as she answered:

"I wouldn't blame you if you didn't believe me, but I also live at the Y. W. C. A., though I give Mrs. Parkham's as my address for letters and telephone calls. It's cheap and—and I have done dining-room work there for a month, waiting—waiting for—for a part in a play."

"Great guns, how that hunch works!" exclaimed the well-known producer, as he sank into his chair from positive weakness. "You take in this situation, don't you?" he demanded with a quick recovery.

"I think I do," answered Miss Lindsey. Then she lifted her big black eyes, in which shone the psychic hunger, though that of the body had been appeased. "I've got to make good, Mr. Vandeford, and I'll do anything you want me to. I've got every right—to live at the Y. W. C. A., and a right to hand food to—to that child in there. You can trust me."

"I believe I can," Mr. Vandeford answered, after looking at her keenly for a few seconds with the glance with which he had picked his winners or failures in the human comedy for many experienced years. "Stop your dining-room work at the nunnery and see that she has a good time, just you and she together. I'll send you matinee tickets to shows I want her to see, and Mr. Farraday and I'll look after the other amusement. I want her to meet only the people I introduce her to, and the Y. W. C. A. is the best place to live in New York—for her. Understand?"

"Yes."

"Find out how much money she has."

"I know now; she told me. She's got a ticket home, good until October first, and a hundred dollars to last until—until the royalties come in from the play. Those royalties have got to come in, too, or her grandfather—" Miss Lindsey's voice was positively belligerent as she began to put the situation up to Mr. Vandeford, whose heart, as that of a theatrical manager, she felt, must be hard by tradition.

"Yes, I know all about that. You get what money you want from Mr. Meyers out there, and fool her about what things cost as much as you can—until the royalties come in. Let me know when things don't run smoothly for the two of you. Of course, this is worth money to you and—"

"I don't want money for—for—looking after her."

"How much did Mr. Farraday offer you for your part?"

"He doubled it when he saw that I was—was hungry, but I know a hundred and twenty-five is right and that's all I expect."

"The one-fifty stands. If all goes well I'll see you get your chance on Broadway this winter. We understand each other now; don't we?"

"Yes."

"Then get the hat quest going. I'm busy."

"Five dollars is her outside limit."

"Can't you juggle?"

"I'll try, but she's—well, you know what a girl like that is."

"Go to it!" With which command Mr. Vandeford led the way into the outer office. A brief aside put the situation he had just adjusted into the willing ear of his co-producer, who beamed with satisfaction at the idea of the joint nesting of these first two theatrical experiences he had captured at the outset of his quest for adventure in the white lights. He immediately began counting Miss Lindsey's advance into her hand, thus giving Mr. Vandeford a word alone with his eminent author, beside Mr. Adolph Meyers's big window.

"Miss Lindsey tells me that she also lives at the Y. W. C. A.," he said with a curious paternal glow in his solar plexus that he had never experienced before.

"Oh, I'm so glad! I know that is foolish of me, but I am a little frightened. I don't know anybody in New York except you and her and—I've never been in a big city before, and only in Louisville a few times with my aunt. I'll enjoy it if she will take me places and bring me back and forth to rehearsals," and the gray eyes beamed with relief and anticipation of being led forth from the Y. W. C. A. into the gay world by a competent guide. "Can we go to some of the the dansants in the afternoon, and maybe to the Metropolitan and the Aquarium?"

"Yes, all those places and more," assented Mr. Vandeford, with a suppressed smile at the diversity of amusements his charge had planned in her sallies from the Y. W. C. A. "You see, it is both the duty and the pleasure of a producer of a play to see that his author has a good time while in the city." It was a surprise to Mr. Vandeford to find himself thus stating the case inversely.

"Oh, but I mean to work hard to help with 'The Purple Slipper,' so I'll be too tired to bother you much to take me places. And I know how hard you work, so don't have me on your mind, will you, please, sir?" The lifted curl of the black lashes and the reverential note in the soft, slurring, Blue-grass voice almost upset the staid deference with which Mr. Vandeford was conversing with the author of his new Hawtry play.

"Oh, play producing isn't so hard on the producer and the author, so we'll have lots of time to frolic," he hastened to assure her, though an uneasy little pang shot into his heart as he thought of just what befell the average author at the rehearsals of his or her play, and he took an additional vow of protection. "Shall I come to take you to dinner and to a show to-night?"

"Oh, I'd love it," she answered, and again the color came up under the gray eyes. "It would be wonderful to have you show me Broadway the first time. I could never forget that."

Then a thought delivered a blow that laid the producer of "The Purple Slipper" low. The afternoon was half gone, and there were dozens of wires that he must manipulate since he had had a change of—heart, concerning "The Purple Slipper," and dinner-time and evening were the only hours that some of the most important could be found.

"Oh, but I can't ask you to do that," he exclaimed, and for almost the first time since the day of his graduation he felt color rise up under his own tanned cheeks. "I have to see the stage director and a lot more people about some things connected with your play. Still, I can't bear to have anybody else get that first night on Broadway away from me. I think it is due me." Being herself entirely sincere, Patricia recognized the utter sincerity of the distress in the voice of her producer where any other woman would have been doubtful of the ready excuse coming immediately after the invitation.

"Then I'll just go to bed early and rest up from the trip, so that I can go with you whenever you get the time to take me. You are working for us both about the play, and if you had rather I waited for you, that is only fair," Miss Adair hastened to assure him with a sincerity equal to his own.

"You are one good sport," was the reply that he made her straight from the shoulder, for the thought of a perfectly beautiful girl going to bed in the Y. W. C. A. and covering up her head and ears from the bright lights of her first night in old Manhattan just to give a strange and reverenced man the pleasure of introducing her to the old city made a profound impression upon him. "To-morrow night we'll wake up things on Broadway. I'll telephone you in the morning to let you know how the play is going and to see if there is anything I can do for you. Now you must all go and let me get busy."

"Yes, this is just about the hour that hats begin to bite well," assented Mr. Farraday, as he removed the girls down to his car with no thought or question as to whether his services would be needed in the enterprise in which he had embarked with Mr. Vandeford.

"Now for it, Pops!" said Mr. Vandeford as the door closed behind his co-workers in the production of "The Purple Slipper," whose work at that moment was to play at a distance from his labor. "I'm going to read that play, and nothing short of something that will injure its prospects if neglected by me must disturb me. When I'm done I'll make plans with you. It will take me several hours, and you stand by every second of the time. Get me?"

"Yes, Mr. Vandeford, sir," answered Mr. Adolph Meyers, and he shut his door into the outer office just as Mr. Vandeford closed his own with a bang.

Then for three hours or more, while the sun sank behind the Palisades and the white lights flashed up from Broadway beneath his window like bits of futile challenges to the dying light of day, Mr. Godfrey Vandeford went through the supreme agony of a long life on Broadway, and was paid in full for every double-cross he had administered to a confrere. He read "The Purple Slipper" and groaned aloud from page to page. He began its perusal sitting erect in his chair, and he ended it hunched over its pages spread on his desk with his head in his hands, his fingers desperately clutching his shock of gray-sprinkled hair. Then in a complete collapse he flung himself back in his chair, elevated his feet to the edge of the desk, and began literally to devour the smoke of a small black cigar. For half an hour he sat motionless, as was his habit when fighting all preliminary battles, and his eyes seemed to be seeing the big old monster city open its thousand gleaming eyes and change its roar of the day to an incessant purr of a night-stalking beast, but in reality he was seeing and hearing a month into the future, and the spectacle thus pre-visioned was the first night of "The Purple Slipper" on Broadway. Then very suddenly he came back into his conscious self and went into action. He rang the buzzer for Mr. Adolph Meyers.

"Pops, get Grant Howard on the wire and ask him to come around here as quick as he can make it. If he talks straight wait an hour for him, if he's thick-tongued go after him yourself. Get him! Now put me on the wire with Rooney if you can find him, and make appointments with Lindenberg for scenery at eleven in the morning. Ask Corbett to send an artist to talk costumes for a period play at eleven-thirty, and have Gerald Height here at twelve sharp. Don't forget to engage that good-looking youngster—Leigh, I think is the name—even if you have to give him a hundred advance. That's all for the present. Get Rooney for me." Mr. Vandeford turned to his desk and began making rapid notes on a pad with a huge, black, press pencil. For five minutes he spread his thoughts upon the paper in great smudges; then his telephone rang, and he took up the receiver:

. . . . . .

"Yes, this is Mr. Vandeford speaking. Hello, Billy!"

. . . . . .

"That new Hawtry play is beginning to promise something. I'm delaying it a week, and I want you to come into it with your sleeves rolled up. We may make a sure-fire hit of it."

. . . . . .

"Oh, no, I'll keep right on getting 'The Rosie Posie Girl' in shape, and shunt Hawtry into it as soon as she cinches the public in this play—or fails."

. . . . . .

"That was just what I was going to hand you—you get four hundred a week for this show, but you'll have to go in and earn it. It's a departure, and you may not like it. You'll have to hammer it a lot, but I'm not signing a single 'Rosie Posie' contract until I see this in shape."

. . . . . .

"I mean it. A stage manager has to take my stuff all hot even if he thinks some of it is cold. Get me?"

. . . . . .

"That's good. I'll give you the completed manuscript Saturday so you can pound and set it for Monday next."

. . . . . .

"That's good. By!"

With which short, but sure, wire-pulling Mr. Vandeford opened his campaign to double-cross his own original plans. He had hardly stopped fixing Mr. William Rooney when Pops looked in upon him and announced Mr. Grant Howard, the eminent playwright.

"Hello, Grant," was Mr. Vandeford's short and unenthusiastic greeting to the small, black-haired person with weak, pink-rimmed, blue eyes, who sauntered into the sanctum and dropped sadly into a chair with his back to the light. A cigarette hung from the left corner of his upper lip, and his hands trembled. "Been hitting 'em up?"

"Yes," answered the playwright, laconically.

"Broke?"

"Pretty bad."

"Want to doctor a play for Hawtry for me by Friday next for a thousand dollars cash?"

"Cash now?"

"Cash Friday."

"Would have to lock myself up in my apartment to do it; but Mazie's been crying for gold-uns for a week."

"Send Mazie to me, and I'll fix that, and hand you the thousand on Friday. Here, take this manuscript over in my other office and be ready to talk it over with me by ten o'clock. I'll see Mazie in the meantime." Mr. Vandeford placed the precious "Purple Slipper" in the hands of a man who at that very moment had two successful plays running on Broadway, his interest in both of which he had sold out for a mess of pottage to be consumed in the company of Miss Mazie Villines of the "Big Show."

"Dolph had better order me up a little cold wine to start on," said Mr. Howard, as he rose languidly to incarcerate himself at the bidding of Mr. Vandeford. The same scene had been enacted between the two bright lights of American drama several times before with very good results. Mr. Howard's brain was of that peculiar caliber which does not originate an idea, but which inserts a solid bone construction as well as keen little sparklets into the fabric of another's labor, and makes the whole translucent where before it may have been opaque. On Broadway he was called a play doctor, and Mr. Vandeford was not the first manager who had shut him up with quarts of refreshment to tinker on the play of many a literary, dramatic, bright light.

"Dolph will give you scotch and soda to your limit, no further," answered Mr. Vandeford, without graciousness. "I'll be here waiting for your talk-over at ten-thirty o'clock."

"All right. Have Mazie come for me after her show?"

"Yes."

With which the eminent playwright betook himself to a small private office which opened into the lair of Mr. Adolph Meyers. After he had entered that retreat Mr. Meyers softly rose from his typing machine and as softly locked him in. Then he proceeded to hunt for Miss Mazie Villines until he got her into conversational connection with Mr. Vandeford. They conversed in these words with great cordiality:

. . . . . .

"Want to earn a nice little two hundred for keeping Grant Howard working at doctoring a play by next Friday for me?"

. . . . . .

"I'm giving him a thousand if it's delivered Friday."

. . . . . .

"Two hundred to you."

. . . . . .

"Not three!"

. . . . . .

"There's Claire Furniss. Grant had her at supper last night at Rector's. She's a beauty, you know."

. . . . . .

"Two fifty."

. . . . . .

"Goes!"

. . . . . .

"Good! Come get him here at my office at eleven-fifteen. Get a taxi by the hour at your stage-door—on me—and come by for him."

. . . . . .

"Good girl! By!"

* * * * *

"What a life!" Mr. Vandeford muttered to himself, then rang his buzzer for Mr. Adolph Meyers.

"Pops, it's eight o'clock. Go get us a couple of slabs of pie at the automat, and then I'll go over to see Breit at the booking office."

"Yes, sir, Mr. Vandeford," Mr. Meyers acquiesced, and departed in search of provender for the lion and himself. Left to himself, Mr. Vandeford fell into another trance, from which he was dragged by another tinkle of his telephone.

"There'll be a wireless to my grave," he muttered as he took down the receiver and snapped into it:

"This is Mr. Vandeford talking."

. . . . . .

"Oh, Miss Adair. Anything the matter?"

. . . . . .

"Speak a little closer into the phone. Miss Hawtry has asked you to supper to-night? Mr. Farraday? And myself?"

. . . . . .

"Did she say I was to come for you?"

. . . . . .

"Do you know, I feel like a brute, but I'm going to tell you to go to bed as per promise. I've got two big guns from Broadway putting licks on the production of 'The Purple Slipper' until the small hours to-night, right here in the office. I'll tell Miss Hawtry about it, and you can—go to bed."

. . . . . .

"Oh, yes, she'll understand. It's her play too, you see."

. . . . . .

"No, you can't help me to-night, thank you just the same. How's Miss Lindsey? Would you like me to send my car to take you girls for a little spin in the park to cool off before you go to bed?"

. . . . . .

"Her hair's wet? And so is yours? I didn't know it was raining."

. . . . . .

"Oh, a mutual shampoo? Bless you both!"

. . . . . .

"No, you don't interrupt me when you call me. You are to call me any time you are willing to do it, if it is every five minutes."

. . . . . .

"No, I mean it."

. . . . . .

"Very well then—good-night and good dreams."

. . . . . .

"Can you beat it?" Mr. Vandeford smiled to himself as he hung up the receiver. "Those two peachy girls washing each other's hair in the Y. W. C. A., within ten blocks of the 'Follies' is to laugh—or cry. Good little Lindsey! I wager she could have got 'em both forty-seven-eleven dates." Then a thought delivered a blow just above his belt in the region of his heart. "So it's Violet's game to use her as a decoy-duck for Denny?" he questioned himself, then gave his own answer in a soft voice under his breath. "Damn her!"

Furthermore he did not communicate with Miss Hawtry to give her Miss Adair's answer to her invitation. He answered it in person, but only after much had happened in the three hours intervening.

The hours from eight to nearly ten Mr. Vandeford spent in slowly munching the refreshment retrieved from the automat by Mr. Adolph Meyers and thinking out loud to that dignitary who took down his thoughts on paper in cabalistic signs of shorthand. They were all notes of what could and must be done in the next few days in the fight for the good fate of "The Purple Slipper."

"I want to see that fellow Reid about that new lighting he provided for the new Sauls show in May. I liked it in some ways and—" Mr. Vandeford was saying when a banging on the door of the private office in which was incarcerated the eminent playwright interrupted him.

"Did you give him the right amount of booze, Pops?" Mr. Vandeford asked.

"Entirely right," answered Mr. Meyers, with his pencil still poised over his pad. The knocking continued.

"See what he wants, Pops, and give him a little more if you have to," decided Mr. Vandeford, as he lit a new cigar and turned to the whirlpool of his desk while he waited for Mr. Meyers's return.

"Say, do you expect me to cast a Sunday School charade into a play in six days, Vandeford?" was the storm of words hurled at him as the released and infuriated doctor of plays hurled himself and his sheaf of manuscript into the door ahead of Mr. Meyers.

"Is that what you think of it?" calmly questioned Mr. Vandeford, as he swung around in his chair. "Sit down and tell me what you intend to do for it."

"I'm going to rewrite the whole blamed mess for fifteen hundred dollars, that's what I'm going to do," announced Mr. Howard with both belligerence and excitement in his voice and in the flash of his sick little eyes.

"Is it as good—or as bad—as all that—money?" questioned Mr. Vandeford. "You'll have to show me," he added calmly, though in the vitals of his heart he was relieved that Howard still spoke of "The Purple Slipper" as a carcass on which to operate.

"It's got a perfectly ripping, basic, sex-comedy idea that climaxes the third act; the rest is piffle."

"I thought some of the character drawing, and one or two of the sentimental bits were—actable," Mr. Vandeford ventured, determined to save as much of the hair and hide of Miss Adair's child as possible, enough at least to help her to recognize and claim it later.

"Oh, we can leave enough bits to anchor the author's name, if that is what you mean," the playwright admitted impatiently. "How about fifteen hundred? I won't do it for less."

"Goes," answered Mr. Vandeford, with the greatest ease with which he had ever dispensed five hundred dollars in all his life. "Now shoot me your layout of the whole thing before Mazie gets here to take you and lock you up."

"I'm going to take that dinner scene where the wife holds her husband's enemies and her lover at bay to see if he gets back home on a sporting-chance bet with lover, and write Hawtry both back and front of it; write her in as the virago she is and give her a chance to act herself for once."

"Good idea," admitted Mr. Vandeford. "But you'll have a hard time writing a gutter girl into a grand dame, won't you?"

"Women are all alike, and the worst viragos are the grand dames. It takes a gutter girl to play one let loose, as they do only on rare occasions. I've got 'em in my own family. That's the reason I'm a black sheep turned out. Got a sister that's worse than me, only respectable and fashionable. See?"

"Yes, I see," again admitted Mr. Vandeford. "You'll keep all the atmosphere and minor stabs in, you say?"

"Sure. They are pretty good staggers, some of the minor stuff. Lots of it is good talk—only wandering. That woman may write something some day if she breaks loose and goes to the devil for a while."

"She won't," said Mr. Vandeford, positively.

"Never can tell," answered Mr. Howard, with indifference. "What did Mazie say?"

"She's due here for you now," answered Mr. Vandeford, looking at his watch.

"Great girl, Mazie. Cooks me dandy rice and runny eggs, and sits on the neck of every bottle in New York while I dig. Couldn't do without her. Say, tell her you are just giving me five hundred, will you?"

"She knows it's a thousand," answered Mr. Vandeford, truthfully. "But I'll keep the extra five hundred you are extracting dark for you."

"That's good, and I'll tell her that I haven't got any—"

"Tell her that you haven't got any money, as usual," were the words which Mr. Howard's fair lion-tamer used to finish his sentence of appeal to Mr. Vandeford for his co-operation in fraud. She had entered past Mr. Meyers with his full approval, for he felt a great relief at the sight of her and her guardianship.

"How's Mazie?" asked Mr. Vandeford, as he rose and, with all the ceremony he would have used for a grand duchess—or Miss Patricia Adair—offered a chair to the pert little person with her funny, good-humored, rather pretty face and her very smart clothes.

"Kicking along, Mr. Vandeford, thank you," was the answer. "Gee, but I did kick the limit to-night, that's sure. I put some shady shines over what Grant wrote into a let-down in my part for me last night in great shape. They et it up, darling." Her naughty face beamed on Howard. "Hawtry was in a box, left. Had a gink in soup to fish with her that looked like real money. Have you rented her out?"

"You folks get along and stop that taxi meter you've got running on me," Mr. Vandeford said, answering the sally with a laugh; but it surprised him that there was a cold space in his vitals at the insult that the little trollop handed him with such comradery, guiltless of any knowledge that it was an insult.

"What was that about touching pitch?" he asked himself as he walked rapidly up four blocks to the theater where Mazie had told him he would find the Violet with her prey. He was just in time to meet them in the lobby. Denny was in the gorgeousness of his "soup to fish," Mazie's and her world's term for evening attire, and the Violet in every way matched his good looks.

"Why, where is Mademoiselle Innocence?" asked Hawtry, with a little frown, as she perceived that Mr. Vandeford was alone and not in regalia.

"Asleep at the Y. W. C. A.," he answered shortly.

"Sure?" asked the Violet, with a little laugh for which he could have killed her.

"Why, she promised Miss Hawtry to go to supper with us and see a midnight show," Mr. Farraday exclaimed, and there was disappointment in his voice as he looked at Mr. Vandeford.

"I couldn't get away from the office until just this minute, and I didn't think I could get away this soon. Miss Adair sent her apologies to you both, and I came over to bring them."

"Evidently we are not to be trusted with the author, Mr. Farraday," laughed Violet, with what good Dennis took as good nature and what Mr. Vandeford knew to be rage.

"Well, bless the child and her beauty sleep, but don't let that kill our evening joy. Come along, Van, and we'll go some place sufficiently disreputable to admit a crumpled person like yourself if you wash your hands. We can have a good powwow over the play. I want to know what you have been doing while I was off the job chasing a hat for the author." And the big, stupid Jonathan linked his arm in that of his anxious and hovering David and drew him along towards the Surrenese, which stood across the street, at the same time guiding the steps of the Violet's satin slippers in that direction.

While the three walked across the narrow street Mr. Vandeford made some rapid calculations and a decision in his mind. He saw plainly that he could not undertake to guard Mr. Dennis Farraday from the Violet and at the same time fend Miss Patricia Adair from her wiles. He'd have to choose between them, and in the twinkling of an eye he chose Patricia. It is said that there is a love between men "that passes the love of women," but nobody has ever witnessed it.

"You people go on to your show—I'm all in," he capitulated as they stood beside Mr. Farraday's car; and the heart of the Violet rejoiced within her.

"I'm sure Miss Adair is getting caught up on sleep so she can go with you to-morrow night. She's a perfect dear, and we'll put her play across," Hawtry cooed to him in her rich voice, and he knew that she felt she had struck his price and bought him off.

"If Denny falls for her he'll fall far; but I can't help it. A girl's a girl, specially from the country," Mr. Vandeford said to himself, as he stood and watched them drive away into the white-lighted canon of Broadway. Then he went home and to bed.

A man may put out his night light, stretch himself between his sheets with the perfection of fatigue and still not sleep. There are various combinations of reasons that prevent his slumber. Mr. Godfrey Vandeford was still awake when Mr. Dennis Farraday let himself into his apartment with a key that had been presented to him five years before when Mr. Vandeford had installed his Lares and Penates in the tall building on Seventy-third Street, some of these Lares and Penates being Mr. Farraday's extra linen and clothes.

"That you, Denny?" Mr. Vandeford asked as he switched on his light and took a hurried glance at a clock on his mantel which registered the hour of 2 A. M.

"Yes," answered Mr. Farraday, as he came to the door of Mr. Vandeford's sleeping apartment. "A thought suddenly struck me, and I stopped in to explode it at you and sleep here."

"Fire away!"

"My mater is coming to town the first of the week to have her glasses changed, and I'm going to telephone out to her to-morrow and ask her to write Miss Adair to have dinner with us informally at the town house while she is here. You know mater's mother was from old Kentucky, and she'll adore the child. Think that's good thinking?"

"Fine," answered Mr. Vandeford, with a glow under his ribs about which he said nothing. Men are vastly inarticulate, but they have various means of communication, and Mr. Vandeford now felt that in his care of his author Mr. Dennis Farraday would understand.

"You know I am on new ground, old chap, but—but how about asking Miss Lindsey, too?" Mr. Farraday questioned, with great diffidence.

"Fine!" agreed Mr. Vandeford, with accelerated glow under his ribs that Miss Lindsey had been proposed when Miss Hawtry might have been invited. "Get to bed, can't you, you Indian, you? Night!"

"Good-night!" answered Mr. Farraday, as he departed to his own room.

And still Mr. Vandeford did not sleep.

Flat upon his back he lay and faced, analyzed, and card-indexed his situation and himself.

"Five years of myself given to that gutter girl and I never even cared; let her annex me for purposes of parade and publicity, and thought it funny sport. Wasted? Something to be deducted for pleasure in artistic success of "Dear Geraldine," but what will it cost me if I have to stand by and see her make old Denny hate himself as I do myself, or worse? She'll not stop short with him, and how do I know what he'll do? The money don't matter, but the—cleanliness does. If I go in to save him, she gave me notice to-night that she would go for that gray-eyed girl. What can she do to her? First, kill her play, no matter what I do to build up a success for the kiddie to cancel that mortgage. Second: do something, say something that will kill that look in those gray eyes when they lift to me. Never! Take Denny, Violet, and the Lord help him; I can't. You've bought me. Washing her hair in the Y. W. C. A.! God bless that institution and—"

At last Mr. Godfrey Vandeford slept.

After his ten o'clock awakening Mr. Vandeford displayed a marked eccentricity in his demeanor. That morning was unlike any morning he had ever experienced, and his conduct surprised himself. A daybreak shower had fallen on the hot and baked city, and it was as fresh as a suburb. Arrayed in the coolest of white silk, linen, and suede, Mr. Vandeford had his chauffeur drive him not to the whirling office but to the most sophisticated Fifth Avenue florist, where he purchased the most unsophisticated bunch of flowers at the highest price to be obtained in New York.

"The Young Women's Christian Association," he commanded the obsequious young Valentine who drove the big Chambers. Mr. Vandeford was never sufficiently unoccupied of mind to pilot a car in and out of New York traffic. For half a second the young Frenchman hesitated.

"I don't know where it is—Find out," commanded Mr. Vandeford, and again he had the foreign experience of feeling the blood burn the under side of the tan on his cheeks.

Valentine consulted the tall man in uniform at the door of the flower shop, and this menial consulted some one within, who must have consulted a directory, judging from the time it took to obtain the correct address. With his eyes straight in front of him, as a chauffeur's eyes should always be, he then drove rapidly down the avenue.

And on that beautiful morning Mr. Vandeford's luck was with him. Valentine whirled expertly up to the curb in front of the large, hospitable building which had emblazoned over its door the impressive Y. W. C. A. letters, letters that send a beacon all over the known world as they did to Mr. Vandeford in little and unimportant New York. Mr. Vandeford got out of the car with hurried grace in his long limbs and, with actual trepidation, went in through the door, into a world he had never even thought of before. He had entered many an African lion jungle with less fear. He glanced with awe at the natty young woman in white linen who presided at the desk, and wanted intensely to put his flowers behind him and back out of the door rather than approach and ask for the lady to whom he wished to donate them. In fact, he might have accomplished such a retreat if again luck had not come his way.

"Oh, Mr. Vandeford, how glad I am that you got here before we went out to the museum," exclaimed a fluty, slurring young voice just behind him, and he found that the gray eyes with the black lashes were just as unusual as he had decided they could not possibly be in the interval that had elapsed since he had looked into them. "Oh, how lovely!"

The last exclamation was made over the edge of the bouquet, which he had tendered Miss Adair as silently as a school-boy hands out his first bunch of buttercups to the lady for whom he has picked them.

"Did you come for me to go to help work on the play?" was the energetic question that brought him out of his trance.

"No, not right now," he answered haltingly, and when he realized how many times he would have to put her off with words to that same effect, his trance became a panic.

"When are you going to need me?" Miss Adair asked him with a direct and business-like look right to his eyes. "I am ready for work now."

"Now what'll I do?" he demanded of himself.



CHAPTER IV

"I thought of a lot of new things for my characters to say, while I was coming up from Kentucky on the train, and I want to put them in." Miss Adair further tortured Vandeford.

"This morning I am going to talk to the electrician and the costumer and the scene painter." Mr. Vandeford answered by telling her the truth, because, with her very beautiful and candid eyes beaming into his, showing both interest and consideration, he had not the power to make up any kind of lie to put her off the trail of "The Purple Slipper."

"I am so glad that I got up early and am ready to go with you! I can tell them about what my great-grandmother really wore when it all happened, and it will be such a help to them!" Miss Adair exclaimed with great business acumen shining in her eyes. Mr. Vandeford gave up the fight, piloted her into his car, and gave the command, "Office!" to the very decorous, but very much interested Valentine.

As they were skimming back up the avenue and about to turn into Forty-second Street, an inspiration came to Mr. Vandeford.

"Didn't you keep some of those costumes of the period of the play hid away in an old brass-nailed leather trunk in your garret?" he asked Miss Adair, with desperate eagerness shining in his eyes.

"Yes," Miss Adair answered readily. Then she hesitated, and the genuine blush rivaled the one in the northeast corner of the bouquet at the waist of the very chic, blue-silk suit. "That is, I did have some—"

"Have they been destroyed?" questioned Mr. Vandeford, with the greatest anxiety.

"No, not exactly," answered Miss Adair, with a distressed tremor at the corner of her curved mouth that rivaled a rose of a deeper hue in the southwest corner of the bouquet.

"I see," answered Mr. Vandeford, with great relief. "You are not just sure where they are. That's great! You can have a talk with Mr. Corbett, who is to design the costumes, and then hop right back home in a day or two, as soon as you are rested and we've had a little bat on Broadway, and find them for him to use in his designs. The management will pay all the expenses and you can—can—"

Mr. Vandeford cast around in his mind for some other business in connection with "The Purple Slipper" that would keep the author thereof busy and contented in Adairville, Kentucky, out of the clutches of Violet and out of the way of his stage director until it all was running smoothly.

"How about your getting a lot of photographs of the house in which it all happened?" he went on. Vaguely he felt photography must be a slow process in Adairville, Kentucky.

Also, in his heart he was forced to acknowledge that his inspiration for getting the author out of the way of her own play while it was being murdered was not entirely original. Tradition had told him, whether truly or not, that at a certain crucial moment in the butchering and rehearsal of "The Great Divide" the poet-author, Moody, had been sent West to hunt a genuine war costume for a great Indian war-chief, his favorite written character, and on his return with the trophy had found the Indian cut entirely and forever from the play.

"Those dresses would be the greatest help you could give us now," he urged with an inward chuckle at the thought of the trick on the great poet, which froze in his heart as he observed two tears balanced on the black lashes of the lovely sea-gray eyes lowered away from his.

"What's the matter?" he gasped, in desperate fear that the Moody Indian story had penetrated to the wilds of Adairville, Kentucky. "You'd only be gone a few days, and everything could wait until you came back. I wouldn't turn a wheel without you, and—" he committed himself deeper and deeper at every step.

"I've had the dresses all made over, and this is one. I've hurt my play just because I wanted to look pretty in New York! I'm humiliated with myself. As if anybody cared how I look; and the play—" The soft little slurs stopped and the beautiful old-blue-silk-clad shoulder trembled slightly against his shoulder as a little ghost of a sob came to the surface and was suppressed while the home-made color faded from beneath two tears that fell from the black lashes.

"Oh, please forgive me, child! It doesn't matter at all, and—"

"You oughtn't to forgive me," the voice trembled on. "Miss Hawtry would have been wonderful in that dinner dress my grandmother wore, and I—I've had two made out of it! I can give them to her and tell her how to put them together again with—"

"You'll do nothing of the kind!" fairly snapped Mr. Vandeford. Then he broke the record in his own thinking processes and decided for the second time to tell the whole truth to this country girl with her mixture of hay-seeds and patrician airs. He directed Valentine to Central Park and made a clean breast of it. It is a pleasure to record that at the Moody Indian story Patricia laughed until two other tears ran down her cheeks, but this time they did not wring Mr. Vandeford's heart, for they coursed over the accustomed roses and were a great pleasure to him.

"I'll go home if you want me to," the talented author of "The Purple Slipper" offered, with a small snap in her eyes, mingled with the accustomed veneration of Mr. Vandeford, her producer. "I don't want to be in anybody's way. I thought I had to come and spend all my money. I want to see the Metropolitan and the Aquarium and Brooklyn Bridge and Trinity Church, ... and ... a Midnight Frolic, because Mamie Lou Whitson, at home, is expecting me to go to one even if Miss Elvira said I ought not to. Can I see just one Frolic before I go home?"

"If you go home now the whole 'Purple Slipper' will go into cold storage until you come back," Mr. Vandeford growled at her, and the effort it took not to hold on to her with bodily fingers was a great strain. "I told you the usual situation because I felt that you were clever enough to make the best of it and help the play a lot. No author ever has seen a play produced as he wrote it, and he has to stand seeing everybody take a whack at it, from the producer to the man who takes the tickets at the front door. I've got a good playwright shut up until Friday rewriting 'The Purple Slipper'; then I'm going to work at it myself and let Miss Hawtry write in all the things she wants to say, and cut out all the things she doesn't. After that, I'm going to turn it over to Bill Rooney, who was born in a barrel down on the wharf and educated in the gutter, but who is the best and highest-priced stage director in New York. He'll do innumerable things to it while he's 'setting it,' as he calls getting it ready for rehearsals. All the actors and actresses will be allowed at times to butcher and scalp their parts and everybody will stab. And if you are a plucky girl you'll sit still and see it done. There will come lots of times that everything you suggest, even very timidly, will be thrust down your throat; but if they are vital they will get under the hide of Bill and opening night you'll see that your pluck has put a lot into the whole thing and that the mutilated and dressed-up play is still your child. Will you trust me and sit in with me and help me make 'The Purple Slipper' go?"

"I do! I will!" answered Miss Adair, with her head in the air and the Adairville roses flaunting themselves in her face. And as she spoke she offered him her slim, long-fingered, white little hand that his completely engulfed as, answering a signal, Valentine turned the car back toward Forty-second Street. "If I've got to have thorns stuck in me and then cut out I'm mighty glad you'll be there."

"Yes, I'll be there," he answered her softly, as he released her hand at least two seconds sooner than he was really obliged to, though he himself could not have said why he did it. He felt like a grown person who frightens a child with a bear tale to make it cuddle to his own strength in the firelight.

Then followed a day in the offices of Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, Theatrical Producer, which, up to that time, could not have been duplicated on Broadway and perhaps never will be, though the results may have the effect of—but that was all in the future of the theatrical business at that time.

"Mr. Meyers," said Mr. Vandeford, as he ushered the author of "The Purple Slipper" into the outer offices, where he found Pops soothing and controlling about seven enraged experts in different lines of dramatic production, "Miss Adair will have the small office from now on to work in when she is not in consultation with me. Please take her in and see that she is made at home while I run through my mail. Yes, Mr. Corbett, I will be ready for you in a few minutes. Sorry to detain you, all of you," with which apology to the body of assembled experts Mr. Vandeford bowed, went into his sanctum, and firmly closed the door, just as Mr. Adolph Meyers bowed the author into her sanctum and as firmly closed her door. Mr. Gerald Height, who had been sitting looking indifferently out of Mr. Meyers' window, looked after the disappearing author as if a perfumed breeze had suddenly blown across his brow, and whistled softly.

"Say, Pops, who, by thunder is—," he was questioning Mr. Meyers with extreme interest, when Mr. Vandeford's buzzer sounded and Mr. Meyers was forced to answer it before he could attend to Mr. Height's question.

Mr. Meyers found Mr. Vandeford pale, but determined.

"Pops," he said, and Mr. Meyers could have sworn that the voice of his beloved chief trembled, "I'm in the devil of a fix, and you have got to throw me a line to pull out; in fact, you'll have to cast in a drag-net if you want to land me."

"If it was a submarine I would make a rescue of you, Mr. Vandeford, sir," the faithful henchman assured the panic-stricken producer.

"She's worse than any submarine ever floated, and I'm rammed—in a corner, Pops. To make a story that is going to be long in acting, short in telling, I've had to put Miss Adair on to what is usually handed out to the authors of plays, and then to stop her wails, offered to let her sit in and watch her play baby hacked up. Her office-hours here and at rehearsals will be from ten mornings to midnight, and what are you going to do about it?" Mr. Vandeford questioned Mr. Meyers with a kind of forlorn hope in his eyes, for Mr. Meyers had often seen him through the crooks of his trade.

"I advise to make it straight to her, Mr. Vandeford, sir, and she will come out all right or otherwise go home. That young lady has the look of a horse on which I won seven hundred at the last Gravesend. Besides, we have not time for play-acting about that 'Purple Slipper.' It is a cold bird and we must be in a hurry about putting pep into it for a success."

"Right-o, Pops! I'll ask her in here, and when I buzz send in Corbett. The poor kiddie!" With which lamentation over the fate he was about to mete out to Miss Adair, Mr. Vandeford dismissed Mr. Meyers and opened the door which led from his sanctum into that which had been so recently assigned to the author of "The Purple Slipper."

That eminent playwright was discovered in the height of fascination, looking down upon the uproar of Broadway.

"I saw a taxicab run over a man and not kill him," she exclaimed with both horror and joy. "I started to call you, but it was all over in a second."

"That's all right. I've seen that hundreds of times, even when they were killed." He reassured her about neglecting to share the excitement with him. "Are you ready to take up the matter of costumes with Corbett?"

"Shall I have to tell him—about my making over—"

"No; just listen to me handle him, and I'll tell you when to break in. I'll give you a lead. Please come into my office." And with coolness of manner, but trepidation of heart, he led her into his office and seated her in a chair beside his at the far side of the desk,—the very chair in which had sat Mr. Dennis Farraday on the day previous, when he had received his initiation into the world of theatricals. Then he buzzed his signal to Mr. Meyers.

Immediately Mr. Corbett entered.

"Morning, Corbett.—Miss Adair, the author of the play I want to talk to you about.—Want to take on a costume play of early Kentucky?" Mr. Vandeford made no pause in which to allow Mr. Corbett to acknowledge his introduction to the author, and Mr. Corbett seemed to bear no resentment for the omission. His astonishment at meeting an author when the costuming of a play was being discussed was profound.

"What date?" he inquired, looking carefully away from Miss Adair.

"What date, Miss Adair?" asked Mr. Vandeford in exactly the same crisp tone in which he was conducting the negotiations with Mr. Corbett.

"1806, I think. It was just before they began to wear—" Miss Adair was beginning to say with a delighted smile that entirely failed to make an impression on Mr. Corbett.

"Good date for costuming," the artist interrupted the author to say, with the easy assurance of a person fully informed. "Styles were distinctive. I dressed 'Lovers' Ends' for E. and K. in 1789, and the costumes kept the piffling play alive for two months. How many dolls and how many boots?"

"How many men and how many ladies in the play, Miss Adair?" Mr. Vandeford questioned her with delight at getting a question to fling to her and also translating for her Mr. Corbett's query.

"Twenty in all," answered Miss Adair. "There are eleven ladies with the—"

"Split even," Mr. Corbett took the words out of her mouth. "Want sole leather or tissue paper, Mr. Vandeford?" Miss Adair caught by psychic sympathy the fact that he was asking if the play was to be costumed as one intended to survive. Consequently her very soul hung on the answer Mr. Vandeford must make to Mr. Corbett's question.

"To play about thirty, I should say," answered Mr. Vandeford after a two minutes' calculating.

"Only a month?" gasped Miss Adair, then colored home-made pink in the height of embarrassment.

"Weeks." Mr. Vandeford answered her gasp without looking at her, but taking the vow gallantly, considering that he felt Mazie Villines to be his sole dependence for a winning manuscript version of "The Purple Slipper."

During this question and answer Mr. Corbett was also calculating.

"About seven thousand if Adelaide makes the Hawtry layout," he finally announced.

"Five hundred advance for the sketches, and a week's option," Mr. Vandeford offered calmly.

"A thousand advance for models of costumes made up," answered Mr. Corbett, just as calmly and firmly. "Have to hunt in museum for materials to go by. Takes experts on fabrics."

"I can give you pieces of silk and things that are cut from the costumes of that period." Miss Adair had learned, and she cut her remark into the conference with precision and decision.

"Genuine?" questioned Mr. Corbett.

"Worn by the characters about whom the play is written."

"Then seven hundred and fifty for made-up models, Mr. Vandeford," Mr. Corbett offered.

"The pieces will be large enough to make the models," Miss Adair said with a curt firmness that was a combination of that used by both Mr. Vandeford and Mr. Corbett and which both startled and delighted the former.

"Six hundred for models, Corbett," he said with finality and with an inward chuckle.

"Six-fifty, Mr. Vandeford," Mr. Corbett answered with equal finality, and for the first time he stole a glance at the author.

"Goes! When?"

"Two weeks?"

"Goes! Good-morning, Mr. Corbett!"

Mr. Corbett's exit was immediate.

"I'm glad Miss Elvira made me put all the pieces of my dresses in my trunk to patch with in case I tore anything. They saved us four hundred dollars, didn't they?" Miss Adair said to Mr. Vandeford with gratified business acumen shining in the sea-gray eyes. "I wasn't much in the way, was I?"

"You were a great help, and that was the first time I ever succeeded in jewing Corbett," answered Mr. Vandeford with satisfactory enthusiasm. Something of relief over the guarding of his author showed in his voice, which second note, however, he sounded too soon as the next ten minutes proved to him. "Now we'll discuss the sets for the production with Lindenberg and then it'll be time for luncheon, and we'll go—"

"Mr. Vandeford, sir, Mr. Height would like to be in next," Mr. Meyers interrupted his chief, just a second too soon, or rather just in time, for if Mr. Vandeford had settled Miss Adair's luncheon plans in that second the fate of "The Purple Slipper" might have been different.

"Show him in, Pops, and have the rest come back at two-thirty," Mr. Vandeford commanded.

Mr. Gerald Height entered.

For five successive seasons on Broadway, with brief dazzling flights into the provincial towns of Chicago, Boston, Washington, and Philadelphia, Mr. Gerald Height had been the reigning beauty, and he well deserved it. He was both slender and broad, with the grace of a faun in young manhood, and with the deviltry of a satyr of more advanced age in his yellow-green eyes, which tilted under high black brows that were arched penciled bows across his forehead. His lips were full and red, but chiseled like a youth's on a Greek frieze and they were mobile and tender and hard by turns. His red-gold hair clung to his head in burnished waves, and this head was set upon his broad, strong shoulders as a flower is set on its parent plant, and his smile was a conquering triumph. He poured it all over Miss Adair as Mr. Vandeford introduced them, and took the chair opposite the producer and the author, with the light from the window fully revealing all of his charms.

"New Hawtry play on, Height, by Miss Adair." Mr. Vandeford began the conversation with his usual directness, and somehow his voice was crisper than usual, for he seemed to get a shock from the radiance of the stage beauty before him that pushed him, with his white-tinged black hair, well forward into middle age.

"Dolph was telling me, and I ran through a synopsis he had on the machine. Powder and furbelows!" As he spoke Mr. Height smiled at Miss Adair with appreciation of herself and got in return a smile of the same degree of appreciation of himself, both smiles not at all lost on the psychologically aging Mr. Vandeford.

"That clause in your contract that lets you out of all costume plays is perfectly good, you know," Mr. Vandeford heard himself saying when he had intended to bluster that same clause aside if the favorite had tried to stand on it, because he well knew that to see Gerald Height in silk stockings and lace ruffles a quarter of a million women might be counted upon to pay two dollars per capita and so assure at least a fifteen per cent. certainty to the box-office receipts of "The Purple Slipper," whose fate had mysteriously come in the last few hours to mean so much to him. "Mr. Meyers has a youngster that we can whip into lead, I think. Now thank me for letting you out, and run along."

"Oh," ejaculated Miss Patricia Adair, and the little exclamation of dismay hit both men at once and made them both sit up straight in their chairs. Also they both looked for a long minute at Miss Adair, and both were aware of the other's scrutiny. Mr. Height broke the tension.

"I might see how buckskins and powdered wig would go," he said, with a tentative glance across the table, which began with Mr. Vandeford and ended with Miss Adair.

"I think you would be perfectly beautiful, and I hope—" Miss Adair paused, and Mr. Height was as competent as either Miss Hawtry or Miss Lindsey had been to judge of the home-made color under the gray eyes. Also he was as much, perhaps more, affected by it, though in the presence of Mr. Vandeford he was wise enough to dissemble his delight.

"Want me to try, Mr. Vandeford?" he questioned with greater deference than he had ever shown a mere manager in the last five years of his triumphant career.

"Of course, it would be a fifteen-per cent. drag if you are willing," answered Mr. Vandeford with managerial delight and manly rage.

"Can I have until to-morrow to decide?" asked Mr. Height. "You see, I haven't read the play or heard the layout," he added to the author of "The Purple Slipper," with deference in his rich voice that had thrilled its millions.

"Could you make it this afternoon if Mr. Meyers goes into it with you? My other man has a big picture offered him at a good figure," Mr. Vandeford answered, with both fear and joy at the prospect of pressing the star into retreat.

"Dolph has told me all he knows about it, which is nothing. He hasn't taken out any parts and seems to have lost the manuscript forever. I hope you kept a copy, Miss Adair." And again the two young things smiled at each other to Mr. Vandeford's devastation.

"Why couldn't I tell Mr. Height about the play while you see the electrician and the other people, Mr. Vandeford?" Miss Adair questioned, her candid gray eyes shining with such a sincere desire to be useful in the crisis that Mr. Vandeford could not suspect her of any adventurous motive. "We could go over in—into my office and you can call me any minute if you need me."

"Great!" exclaimed Mr. Height. "Then I could let you know right away if I thought I could do the part justice, Mr. Vandeford."

"Goes!" answered Mr. Vandeford, as he motioned them into the inner office, which had been conferred upon the author of "The Purple Slipper," and rang his buzzer for Mr. Meyers.

"Find Mr. Farraday and ask him to come around here immediately if he is anywhere near, or to come at four if he can't get here in ten minutes," he commanded. "Heard from Mazie?"

"Mr. Howard is in a good working soak, is her report, Mr. Vandeford, sir, and I have the wire that Mr. Farraday is on his way here," was the double answer Mr. Meyers returned to Mr. Vandeford.

"Good! Give me my letters to sign," Mr. Vandeford answered.

Mr. Meyers brought in a sheaf of letters, and Mr. Vandeford was in the act of setting pen to paper when the door of the inner office opened after a gentle knock and Miss Adair entered, followed by Mr. Height.

Mr. Vandeford looked up quickly and found Miss Adair close beside his chair, looking down upon him with her beautiful reverence and confidence in him entirely unimpaired.

"Mr. Height wants me to go and have luncheon with him and tell him about the play. He's hungry, and so am I. Can you spare me if I'm working while I'm eating? May I go?"

Mr. Vandeford rose to his feet quickly, and a great Broadway star was in closer danger of descending head-first from a six-story window upon that thoroughfare than he ever knew. Then "The Purple Slipper" rose and demanded its chance of success with Gerald Height as "drag" and the tragedy was averted.

"Run along, children, and don't spill your milk on your bibs," he answered them, with a dissembling smile that would have done credit to Mr. Height himself when upon the boards with Miss Hawtry. They departed in great spirits, and Mr. Vandeford noticed that Mr. Height had not been at all concerned as to how his manager's inner man would be served.

Thereupon Mr. Vandeford propped his feet upon the desk, got out one of the most evil of the cigars he kept in a drawer of his desk for just such crises, and went into communion with himself for ten minutes. Upon that communion broke Mr. Dennis Farraday, who got the full force of it.

"I came to pick up you and Miss Adair to go out in the park to luncheon. It's cooler there. Where is she?" were the words with which Mr. Vandeford's partner in the production of "The Purple Slipper" greeted him.

"She has gone out to luncheon with a damned tango lizard," was the disturbed and disturbing answer his courtesy received.

"What do you mean?" demanded Mr. Farraday, bristling.

"She met Gerald Height a half-hour ago, here in this office, and then went out to luncheon with him," was Mr. Vandeford's answer to Mr. Farraday's bristling.

"Without consulting you?"

"No! I consented all right enough."

"Why didn't you tell her if you didn't want her to go with him?"

"See here, Denny, I want to ask you if anything in my past life makes you think that I am a proper old hen to have a downy little chicken thrust right under my wing for safe keeping, whether I hatched her or not?" Mr. Vandeford demanded, and his rage was so perfectly impersonal and perplexed that Mr. Farraday sat down to go into the matter to his rescue.

"What do you mean, Van?" he asked in a calm voice and manner that were most grateful to Mr. Vandeford.

"Just this: Here's a girl come up here, from a place where a girl is guarded like a pearl of great price, into the muck and excitement of the getting together of a Broadway production in which she is directly interested. I don't know what to do. If I spend my time hovering over her, her show will go cold and break her. She's poor. I told her as much of what she is in for as I dared and still she wants to stay and see it all through, demands to stay and be let in for the whole thing. What'll we do?"

"Suppose she'd go with me up to visit the mater and be motored down to participate in—in expurgated moments?" asked Mr. Farraday, as he ruffled his hair into a huge plume on the top of his head.

"She would not. She's got a taste of it and she'll thirst for more. And, for all that unsophistication, she is a clever kid. She'll get Height into a costume play before luncheon is over and that'll go a long way to cinch a hit for 'The Purple Slipper.' He's made a fad of not playing costume, and all the women in New York will flock to see him in velvet and lace. She bargained that fish Corbett out of four hundred dollars in the preliminary costume deal, and if anybody has to send her home it will have to be you. I can't do it."

"Well, just gently warn her about Height and things of that kind, can't you?"

"I cannot! Would you tell a woman who is walking a tight rope that the ground sixty feet below her is covered with broken champagne bottles?"

"Then she's got to go home," decided Mr. Dennis Farraday, positively.

"How'll you make her?"

"You've got to do it. She's got awe of you planted six feet deep in her soul. Anybody could see that. You've got to send her."

"Can't be done," growled Mr. Vandeford in desperation. "Wish I were married to six respectable women and then I could make 'em all chaperon her in turns, while I feed her fool play to the public."

"You'd only have to strike out the syllable 'un' before 'married' by a little trip to the City Hall to have one mighty fine wife," Mr. Farraday said with a straight look into Mr. Vandeford's eyes, which was so deeply affectionate that it gave him the privilege of opening the door to any holy of holies.

"Violet and I are all off, Denny, and it ought never to have been on," was the straight-out answer he got to his venture, an answer that Miss Hawtry would have felt smoothed greatly the path of her present adventures in life.

"Poor girl! I knew she was hurt somehow, but I thought—forgive me, old man." With a tenderness in his voice that both alarmed and puzzled Mr. Vandeford his big Jonathan closed the subject and snapped a lock on it. "Come over to the Astor with me for a cold bite."

"Goes!"

The cool, green-leafed Orangery at the Hotel Astor is the oasis in the desert days of rehearsal for all early fall plays, and beside its tinkling fountain and under its tinkling music can be found at luncheon all of the theatrical profession who are not around the corners at the equally cool, white-tiled Childs restaurants. Beside and around the green wicker tables careers of managers, artists, actors, playwrights, electricians, and scenic artists are made and unmade in the twinkling of some bright or heavy-lidded eye. Each and every feaster watches each and every other feaster with the quick, wary eye of a jungle being consuming its food before it is snatched from him or her; and gossip reigns over all.

"Gee, look at the swell dame Gerald Height has got cornered over there!" exclaimed Mazie Villines, as she looked up from a frapped melon, which a "heavy" moving picture man was "buying" for her consumption. "The way them society queens do fall fer him!"

"Put your blinkers on, Mazie, put 'em on, and don't take a shy at Height over my knife and fork! Let him eat what he pays for and me the same," growled the huge man. "I let you put up that drunk Howard for a week, and that's rope enough."

"I'd like to feed him the green in his 'runny' eggs; it makes me sick to open for him," was the adored Mazie's way of speaking of her eminent playwright.

"Well, get his wad first," was the heavy's advice.

Just at this moment Mazie had the delight of seeing Mr. Godfrey Vandeford enter with his "soup and fish" friend Mr. Dennis Farraday. As they both had to pass directly by the table at which sat Miss Adair and Mr. Height, of course they both paused for greetings, which included the introduction of Mr. Height to Mr. Farraday.

"I could hardly eat in this beautiful cool place when I thought that maybe you would work on in the hot office with nothing with ice packed around it for your luncheon," said Miss Adair, as she raised her eyes to Mr. Vandeford's with the adoration still intact after at least three-quarters of an hour assault upon it by Mr. Gerald Height's disturbing personality. "I wanted to go back for you, but Mr. Height said that Mr. Meyers fed you cold pie when you were busy, and that you roared dreadfully if anybody interrupted you when you were eating it!"

"He does," Mr. Farraday interjected, smiling down at her in a way that it was unwise to do in the Orangery at noon; and it lighted a fuse he little suspected. Miss Violet Hawtry caught the smile in mid-air and then promptly turned her back and became all charming attention to the gentleman with whom she was having luncheon, who was no other than the celebrated Weiner, who had built three theatres in two years and was building more. He was of the bull-necked type of Hebrew and not of the sensitive, exquisite type of the sons of the House of David to which belong the E. & K.'s, and the S. & S., as well as the great B. D.

"When will the new theatre be completed, Mr. Weiner?" Miss Hawtry asked, as she turned over an iced shrimp and tore at a lettuce leaf with her fork.

"October first," answered Mr. Weiner, past a mouthful of Russian herring.

"What will the opening show be?" asked Miss Hawtry, with indifference, though there was a glint under her thick lashes lowered over her snapping Irish eyes.

"'The Rosie Posie Girl,'" answered Weiner, and he swallowed his herring and gave her a shrewd glance at the same time.

"Vandeford will never sell it to you," Miss Hawtry announced calmly, as she ate the shrimp and the torn lettuce leaf.

"Maybe!" answered Weiner with equal calmness. "What are his plans for his new show that he is tearing up Forty-second Street about?"

"Road from September fifteenth until New York October first."

"What theater in New York?"

"I don't know." As she made this answer Miss Hawtry looked up and caught a snap in Weiner's small black eyes, perched on each side of the hump of his red nose.

"Has the show got goods?" he asked.

"I'm going to put some into it," answered Miss Hawtry calmly.

"Why?"

"I like Mr. Dennis Farraday, who's Vandeford's angel. I don't want to see Van take the money out of his pocket and get away with it." Miss Hawtry was dealing in half-truths to a lie expert.

"Hooked Farraday yet?"

"Not quite."

"No use bargaining with a woman when she's fishing for a man, but if he slips the hook come to me and I'll show you a new bait. When do you open?"

"Twenty-third of September, at Atlantic City."

"I'll be there."

"I hope you will, and—" but the rest of Miss Hawtry's remark was cut off by Mr. Dennis Farraday's genial greeting, backed by Mr. Vandeford's more restrained pleasure at happening upon her and her co-plotter, to whom she introduced Mr. Farraday.

The exchange of amenities was as brief as it was cordial, but as Mr. David Vandeford and Mr. Jonathan Farraday passed on to a table which the discreet head waiter had reserved in case of the unexpected and tardy arrival of just such personages as Mr. Godfrey Vandeford and his friend, Mr. Farraday, Miss Hawtry had answered a low-voiced question from Mr. Farraday with a sadly tender smile and the words:

"At eight?"

"The Claridge got me a box for the Big Show and a table at the Grove Garden for to-night, Van," remarked Mr. Farraday, as he unfolded his napkin. "It is the coolest place in town, and we might as well let the kid get just one good peep before she goes back into the shell ... if she goes. I'll take Miss Hawtry on and leave the box number for you and Miss Adair."

"Right-o," answered Mr. Vandeford, with a growl. For the life of him he could not understand just why Mr. Gerald Height should have the privilege of feeding his author alone, while he seemed to be always forced to enjoy her company in the presence of others. He looked across the room, met the gray eyes laughing at him over a glass that was plainly iced tea, and was forced to exchange smiles with his downy little chicken, who was delightedly peeping out of her shell.

"I think Mr. Vandeford is the most wonderful man I ever met," confided Miss Adair to Mr. Height, with no suspicion of the incitation such a remark would be to the ardor of the beloved of many women.

"He's a great producer; had three big hits hand-running and fell down on 'Miss Cut-up' because he wouldn't stand up to Hawtry, and let her cop the whole show," answered Mr. Height with great generosity, for in reality Mr. Height had the very poor opinion of Mr. Vandeford that it is the custom of all actors to hold in regard to their respective managers. However, he was sugar-coating the pill he was determined to administer to Miss Adair without delay. "He ought to marry Hawtry and get a bit in her mouth and the spurs on."

"Is—is he in love with Miss Hawtry?" asked the author of "The Purple Slipper" with great interest, and the home-made color rose several degrees, that were not warranted by the calm gossip of the situation.

"That's the noise he makes, but who can tell?" answered Mr. Height, reveling in the Adairville roses and no more aware of their origin than was their owner. "He meets bills, but nobody gets in behind his window-boxes." And Mr. Height raised his glass of Tom Collins, perfectly contented with the thought that he had enlightened Miss Adair about the private life of Mr. Vandeford. As a matter of fact he had failed utterly to do so, as she had not understood a word of his Broadway patois. "There's the great B. D. and beloved son-in-law," and Mr. Height nodded and smiled at a white-haired man and his companion who were seating themselves at the table next to them.

"B. D.?" questioned Miss Adair.

"Benjamin David," answered Mr. Height. "He and his son-in-law are putting on a great new show. Offered me a lead and—but I think I'll stick by 'The Purple Slipper.'" His eyes were so ardent as slightly to disturb Miss Adair and very greatly disturb Mr. Vandeford, who caught the warmth across several tables, and ground his teeth.

However, Miss Patricia Adair was fully capable of handling such a situation, for ardor is ardor, whether encountered on Broadway in New York or Adairville in Kentucky, and Miss Adair had met it many times—and parried it.

"I've really got to leave this perfectly lovely place and hurry down to the Y. W. C. A., to get some costume samples for Mr. Corbett," she said calmly, as she began to draw on her gloves and pull down the veil that reefed in the narrow brim of the jaunty hat Miss Lindsey and she had by a great stroke of luck discovered on a side street the day before.

"Y. W. C. A.?" questioned Mr. Height, in stupefaction.

"Everybody looks that way when I say it!" laughed Miss Adair, with a dimple flaunting above the left corner of her mouth. "Will you take me there or put me on something or in something that will let me off very near?"

"I'll take you," answered Mr. Height tenderly and heroically, as he held the blue-silk coat for her to slip into.

As the two of them stood together the great Dean of American Producers looked upon them with interest, and rose and offered his hand to Mr. Height.

"Well, how about it?" he asked, with a smile under his beetling white brows.

"Mr. David, please meet Miss Adair, the author of Mr. Vandeford's new Hawtry play," Mr. Height said by way of beginning an answer to the question put to him. "At last I'm going into wig and ruffles; the play is of colonial Kentucky."

"I am delighted to meet you, Miss Adair," said the Broadway Maximus, "and you are fortunate to have Mr. Height for your play. I covet him, but I'll wait until next time."

"Oh, thank you for not taking him away!" said Miss Adair, with a displaying of the roses which the great B. D. noted with pleasure. "Will you come and see our play and tell us what you think about it?" Miss Adair made her request, which was against the traditions of conventions on Broadway, with the unabashed air with which she had invited the reigning Governor of Kentucky to have dinner with her and Major Adair at the state fair the year before.

"Ask Mr. Vandeford to invite me to a dress rehearsal," answered the great one, and Gerald Height beamed with pride, while Miss Adair displayed only gratitude and delight as they took their departure.

In their exit they passed Mr. Vandeford's table and stopped to speak to him and Mr. Farraday.

"That's Benjamin David Mr. Height introduced to me, and he's coming to help us at the dress rehearsals of 'The Purple Slipper.' It's wonderful!" Miss Adair exclaimed, as Mr. Vandeford rose and stood beside her. "Mr. Height is going down to the Y. W. C. A. with me, and we'll be right back to the office with those pieces of silk for the costumes. Mr. David wants him for lead, but he's going to be in 'The Purple Slipper' and go to Mr. David next. Isn't that fine?" and without waiting for an answer to her question the busy playwright departed on important business connected with the costuming of her play.

"Somehow, Van, I don't see why we should worry," Mr. Farraday said, as he looked at the retreating figures of the pair whose beauty was attracting no little attention in the feasting Orangery. "She's getting along all right, eh?"

"Remember you've been in the business about forty-eight hours, Denny, and never forget that every knife here is sheathed in a smile and everybody carries a rubber stamp with double X on it," answered Mr. Vandeford, with gloom, as he pushed back his coffee-cup. "She's tasted blood now and that ends it. She's with us, and the Lord help her! I can't!"

"Well, come on and let's get to the office," answered Mr. Farraday, with a cheerful lack of sympathy with his friend's anxiety for the talented budding playwright.

"Everything all O. K., Mazie?" asked Mr. Vandeford, as he passed the table where the Miss Villines and the heavy movie man were finishing their bottles of cold beer.

"Soused and scribbling," answered Mazie, cheerfully.

"Remember, Friday."

"Remember your check-book."

"Goes!"

Shortly after Mr. Vandeford and Mr. Farraday reached the office of Mr. Vandeford, Miss Adair, accompanied by Mr. Height, appeared with a neat little parcel in their possession. Also Miss Adair had another, very conventional, corsage bouquet in the place of the one Mr. Vandeford had given her in the morning and which at luncheon had begun to look the worse for wear.

"Now what shall I do?" she asked Mr. Vandeford, with great energy.

"Go right down and get in my car and go back to the Y. W. C. A., to take a long nap. I'll call for you for that Broadway eye-opener at eight o'clock to-night, so get 'em well rested," he answered, and he smiled when he noted that the expression in her eyes that he had begun to look for with desperate eagerness still held. Mr. Meyers had engaged Mr. Height with a contract, and Mr. Farraday had been an interested spectator to the tussle. Producer and author were alone.

"Mr. Height asked me to go to see Maude Adams, but I told him I couldn't go anywhere at night until you could take me," said Miss Adair with sparks of joy in the sea-gray eyes. "I'm so glad it is to-night."

"Did you really tell Height that?" demanded Mr. Vandeford, with youth swelling through his arteries.

"Yes."

"Go, child, go and get a nap," Mr. Vandeford laughed, as he opened the door for her and started out to descend and deliver her into the keeping of faithful Valentine.

"I'll put her into the car, Van," offered Mr. Farraday. "They need you here in this fight."

And again his author was snatched out of Mr. Vandeford's clutches.

Several hours later a very interesting scene was enacted in two tiny adjoining rooms under the roof of the Y. W. C. A., with Miss Adair and Miss Lindsey as the principals.

"If you take away all that net there won't be any waist left to the dress. Don't!" pleaded Miss Adair, as Miss Lindsey stood over her with determined scissors.

"I'm making it absolutely perfect, and you can't tell by looking down on it. You'll have to trust me," answered Miss Lindsey, with pins in her mouth, as she snipped away a funny little tucker of common new net with which Miss Elvira Henderson of Adairville, Kentucky, had for the sake of her spinster convictions ruined a triumph she had accomplished directly out of "Feminine Fashions" and the ancestral trunk.

"Will it be—be modest?" demanded Miss Adair.

"A lot more modest than having that ugly mosquito netting telling everybody that you are not willing to have them see your marvelous neck and arms except through its meshes. Nobody will think you know you've got 'em, if you show them like everybody else; but they'll think you think you are a peep-show if you cover them half up." And as she spoke Miss Lindsey gave another daring rip and snip. Her philosophy struck home.

"That's every word true," agreed Miss Adair, with relief. "I'll just forget about my skin there, as I do about that on my face and hands and nobody will notice me at all."

"That's it. Skin is no treat to New York, and nobody will look at you twice." Miss Lindsey had a struggle to keep her voice and manner unconcerned enough, as she surveyed her finished product and saw that from under her hands would go forth a sensation. In the old ivory satin with its woven rosebuds and cream rose-point, above which rose pearly shoulders and a neck bearing a small, proud head, with close waves of heavy black hair, Miss Adair was like a dainty, luscious, tropical fruit that is more beautiful than its own flower. "How an old maid in a country town made that dress I don't see!" Miss Lindsey added reflectively.

"It was you, who unmade it," answered Miss Adair with gratitude. "I wish you were going, too," she added as she nestled to the taller girl for a perfumed second.

"I'm going to luncheon with you and Mr. Farraday to-morrow," answered Miss Lindsey, with a pleased laugh at Miss Adair's sudden clinging that indicated her sincerity in not wishing to leave her alone.

"Oh, lovely! And Mr. Height will be with us too, for I promised to have luncheon with him again," she exclaimed, as Miss Lindsey began to insert her into an evening wrap made of a priceless old Paisley shawl which "Fashions" had also tempted Miss Elvira to desecrate with her scissors.

"Gerald Height?" asked Miss Lindsey, and her eyes first snapped and then smouldered. "Where did he get in on—where did you meet him? Does Mr. Vandeford know about it and—"

"I met him in Mr. Vandeford's office. He's in 'The Purple Slipper,' and I went to luncheon with him to-day. I meant to tell you about it, and meeting Mr. David, but Mr. Vandeford told me to get a nap and I thought I—"

Here the speaking-trumpet in the hall informed Miss Lindsey that Mr. Vandeford was waiting for Miss Adair below, and she had to let her treasure depart from her.

"I wonder just how straight Godfrey Vandeford is," she mused, as she picked up the discarded tucker of coarse netting. "The poor kid! I wish she was at home hidden behind Miss Elvira's skirts. Hawtry and a girl like that! Damn men!"



CHAPTER V

It may be that in the long life of Mr. Godfrey Vandeford he had passed a more perturbed evening than that on which he led his protege, the author of "The Purple Slipper," to her debut under the white lights of Broadway, but he could not recall the occasion. His grilling had begun while he waited for his charge to descend in the lobby of the Y. W. C. A. and it ended—

"We are delighted to have Miss Adair stay with us while her play is being rehearsed," a very pleasant young woman, with a trim figure, kind and wise eyes, and gray-sprinkled hair, remarked to him after she had whistled the fact of his arrival above. "When such men as you, Mr. Vandeford, begin to put on clean historical plays, many of our anxieties will be over. I look on each musical show that appears on Broadway as a personal enemy."

"I am glad indeed, Madam, that we are going to claim you as a friend of 'The Purple Slipper,'" Mr. Vandeford answered, with his most pleasant smile. Somehow the sight and sound of that executive young woman in charge of his young author gave him a calmness that he needed, and his confidence shone in his face.

"We are deeply interested in Miss Adair, for we have had influential letters sent us about her, and of course we are looking forward with eagerness to seeing her play. She is such a dear child!"

The influential letters and the increased warmth in the young woman's tone in speaking about his author drew Mr. Vandeford still nearer to her, both in body and in spirit. He leaned slightly against the desk and smiled again.

"May I send you seats for some night the first week of 'The Purple Slipper'?" he asked, with the greatest deference. And it must be recorded that in making the offer Mr. Vandeford was not bidding for the distinction conferred on him in the next few seconds.

"That will be delightful," exclaimed the young woman. "And, Mr. Vandeford, here is a latch-key to the front door, to use to-night if you and Miss Adair are a little later than midnight in coming home. Remember to give it to her after you have put her inside the door and tell her to hang it on the rack opposite the number of her room. There she comes now!"

Mr. Vandeford accepted the latch-key of the Y. W. C. A. with awe and looked at it as he would have looked at a decoration handed him by the Metropolitan governors. Then he glanced up and beheld Miss Adair displaying herself to his new-found friend.

"You are very pretty, my dear," she was saying with an affectionate smile. "Just let me put a pin here in this fold of lace," and expertly she reefed up the last fold of rose-point that Miss Lindsey had snipped down in a hurried finish of her remodeling. Strange to say Mr. Vandeford felt still more further drawn to his young Christian Association friend.

"Now run along, both of you, and have a pleasant evening," she said to them as she turned to answer the telephone.

"That girl is an extremely delightful person," Mr. Vandeford remarked, while he and Valentine were tucking Miss Adair under the linen robe in the car.