"You shall," he answered, and turned toward Mrs. Farraday, who was coming across the grass towards them with a huge sheaf of myrtles for his car flower-baskets in her arms. "I wonder if you'll let me take my author back to town in a hurry to-night, Mater Farraday," he pleaded, with the affectionate smile in both his voice and eyes that he had learned to use in coaxing her since the days ten years ago when she had begun to mother him along with big Dennis. "I—I sorter—sorter need her."

Mrs. Farraday looked at them both with a keenness under the affection in her glance, and then laughed merrily.

"Yes, go with him, Patricia," she commanded. "I have lived through the week before the presentation of five plays for Van, and I think that it is only just that you should share that ordeal with me. He's impossible, and demands—everything. I gave him a perfectly new and wonderful hat that cost a hundred and ten dollars for the second scene of 'Dear Geraldine' right off my head at the dress rehearsal, and 'Miss Cut-up' did her dances on one of my most choice Chinese rugs. Now he's taking you from me. But go!"

"Here's your wrap, still in the car, so hop in," commanded Mr. Vandeford hurriedly, as though he feared that Mrs. Farraday would withdraw her sympathetic permission. "Good-night, and thank you!"

"Good-night, you two—two dear children," returned Mrs. Farraday, as she saw them off, after tenderly embracing Miss Adair and making plans for their future meeting. "How lovely it would be!" she murmured to herself, with a lack of definition, as she went back to the stately house behind the tree, where windows were beginning to glow.

For a long time the producer and his author were silent.

"I hate it—and I love it," Miss Adair finally said, with her soft, slurring voice lowered almost to a whisper as Valentine sped them along the country road perfumed and dusky with the early night, though a silvery radiance proclaimed a chaperoning moon as imminent.

"That is the proper way for an author to feel about a play one week before the opening," Mr. Vandeford assured her, with a laugh keyed to match her declaration. "It shows an entire sympathy with the poor producer."

"Suppose, just suppose, that the producer had been anybody but you and I had had to stand all—" Words failed Miss Adair in imaging her plight as author to another producer than Mr. Vandeford.

"Any other producer might have done better than I have done for you," Mr. Vandeford answered her, with a sadness in his voice that he himself had never heard before. And as he spoke he resolved to tell her the whole Hawtry situation, which was haunting him day and night; to begin with the purple, letter-manuscript hunch, which he had lightly taken up to spank Miss Hawtry for trying to double-cross him with Weiner about "The Rosie Posie Girl," and end up with the hopeless state of his feelings about herself. Miss Adair herself stemmed the confession which might have altered the fate of that good machine "The Purple Slipper."

"You've made the whole horrible experience worth while to me, and I'm going to be a great playwright yet, just to make you—you proud of me," she assured his sadness in the purple dusk, and this time Mr. Vandeford was so sure of the flutter that he reached out his hand and captured a part of it, a white, slim little hand that nestled into his as though it were not in any way aware of doing so. "I'm going to dinner with Miss Herne to-morrow night, so Mr. Kent can show me what is the matter with part of his costume for the third act, and then I'm going to coax Mr. Corbett to fix it over for him," she continued, speaking of the business of learning to be the great playwright she had promised him to become.

"Er—er, did you say dinner with Bebe and—and Kent?" Mr. Vandeford stammered as a desperate opening for letting his author know just what she was doing in visiting that establishment without-the-law.

"Yes, I know about them; Mildred told me, but I told her that I was going to accept the 'broad standard' that prevailed in my profession. I like both of those people a lot. What business is it of mine if they don't want to get married?" Miss Adair's voice was coolly unconcerned and professional.

"Help!" ejaculated Mr. Vandeford, holding the slim little hand as if drowning. And indeed he did have a sinking sensation, which, strange to say, was relieved by a quick mental vision of the capable young woman at the desk of the great international safety.

"And I know about Mr. Height's three divorces, and I think he is to be pitied instead of criticized for being so unfortunate and lonely. Mildred says she doesn't believe he is as lonely as he tells me he is, but I know he is. I asked Miss Herne to ask him to dinner, too, and she did," Miss Adair continued, thus making little stabs into Mr. Vandeford's vitals.

And right there Mr. Vandeford paid the entire penalty for all his tilts against organized morality by feeling unworthy to take a beautiful, fragrant, adoring, confiding girl in his arms and telling her all he had learned of the tragic results of such tilts. His predicament was tragic, though unique. If he summed up these others, he sized up himself to her, and by what judgment he taught her to judge them she would judge him when the time came. If he taught her to turn from Kent or Height she would turn from him, when she knew him entirely, as she surely would soon. And, forsooth, how would he prove to her that he was a better man than the copper-headed tango lizard, Height, though he knew himself to be? And who was this girl, anyway, to come out of a little back-woods town where the standards of life were so narrow that all who could lived out of them in degrading secrecy, and make him feel himself unworthy when he had lived openly in a way about which his own conscience had not troubled him? Why did he hesitate to tell her about his affair with the Violet and his anxiety about her contract, and why should his face burn at the thought of telling her how he had coolly let his best friend in for the prospect of an affair with the star for the purpose of protecting her and her play? And why should the sex and business standards of his world be entirely different from those of hers or any other world! On the other hand why shouldn't they all double-cross and prey on and defame and applaud each other to their heart's content? Why should they care if they were judged by—? At this part Mr. Vandeford's bitter reflections were suddenly invaded by a perceptible collapse of Miss Adair's soft and proud young body against his, and a round, warm cheek fell against his silk-clad sleeve, as he perceived that his eminent author had plunged suddenly into the depths of healthy and innocent slumber, while he had been moralizing about her and the rest of the universe. He slipped his arm about her with cautious tenderness and made her comfortable, while he muttered to himself:

"She's a white flame and, God willing, I'm going to keep her that!"

During the next week the "white flame" burned high and bright while the author of "The Purple Slipper" threw herself into her place in the grinding of the machine that was to turn out a perfected play on the following Tuesday night at Atlantic City. Everywhere Mr. Rooney was tightening bolts and polishing surfaces until they glistened while he snapped and tried out all bands.

Miss Lindsey was pale and quiet, but she acted her part to Mr. Rooney's entire satisfaction, though he never said so. Mr. Leigh's feet were still a target, and the glowering girl, Miss Grayson, was always tearful, but constantly improving. When the company was not being ground and polished, Mr. Corbett's tailors and dressmakers were fitting costumes, and the property man was checking over and over each demand of each and every person, from the fresh rose Mr. Kent was to give to Dame Carrington to the mud that was to be splashed every day upon Mr. Gerald Height's riding-boots for his last and triumphant entry. Miss Adair had lost all sense of the play as a whole and only thought of it as distracting and distracted bits. She had, of course, never witnessed the scenes between Miss Hawtry and Mr. Height, as they were still rehearsed in private and would be until the night of the dress rehearsal on Monday at Atlantic City. This was well.

But one thing she kept with her through the whole strain; the sense of being one with Mr. Godfrey Vandeford and that one working for pure joy.

As for Mr. Vandeford, his eyes sank back under his brows, and Mr. Adolph Meyers was with him far into every night.

"How does the booking stand now, Pops?" Mr. Vandeford demanded on the Thursday night before the opening Tuesday.

"Atlantic City next week, Wilmington and New Haven the next if need be, and—it is to Syracuse or Toronto we must jump, Mr. Vandeford, sir," answered Mr. Meyers, with beads of perspiration on his high brow.

"Violet will never make that jump, Pops. Her contract closes the day we open in Atlantic City, and there we'll close, too, if we haven't New York right in sight. What'll we do?"

"It is many a show closed before it opened," Mr. Meyers said, with a wary look at Mr. Vandeford.

"This show is going to open and never close—until it's had a thorough Broadway try-out, Pops," said Mr. Vandeford, quietly. "Anything from Mr. Breit?"

"Nothing to hope for a Broadway opening before November first."

"I'll pass the question up Friday, and then see what I'll do," Mr. Vandeford said slowly as if turning his back for the moment to something that stared him in the face.

All Friday morning he worked with "The Purple Slipper" machine with a bitter defiance in his eyes that made Miss Adair keep close to his side, though she didn't understand her reason for doing so.

"Is anything the matter?" she questioned, with her gray eyes stricken with alarm. The fear for her play in those gray eyes sent Mr. Vandeford into desperate measures. He asked Miss Hawtry to go to luncheon with him, and she graciously accepted.

"Where do we get in on Broadway after Atlantic City, Van?" she asked as soon as she was served with her iced melon.

"We get in all right," he parried, putting his spoon into his cantaloupe.

"That's fine. I don't mind that Atlantic City week, but I'm glad I'm past ever doing the road again except to the Coast. They'll eat up 'The Rosie Posie Girl' in Chicago and San Francisco." Miss Hawtry was deliberately declaring her intentions to Mr. Vandeford without saying a word about them.

"I'm going to take 'The Purple Slipper' over to London before I take it West." Mr. Vandeford answered her declaration with another not put in words, but so well did he know the workings of her shrewd, small mind that he saw that the game was up unless he did what he must do. During the rest of their luncheon they talked about the Trevors.

Straight from the Astor Mr. Vandeford walked into the office of Mr. Weiner.

"Weiner," he asked, without any sort of preamble, "will you give a month's try-out of my play, 'The Purple Slipper,' in your New Carnival Theater from October first to November first, with a proper guarantee, and then an option on an unlimited run there if it makes good, for a half-interest in 'The Rosie Posie Girl' without Hawtry?" Mr. Vandeford knew that he was offering Mr. Weiner a good thing, for the rights of "The Rosie Posie Girl" had been hotly contested by all the big theatrical managers on Broadway the winter before, and Mr. Vandeford had got them from Hilliard because of his success with "Dear Geraldine" by the same author. They had all coveted it because it was one of those combinations about the success of which there could be no doubt. In offering Weiner a half-interest Mr. Vandeford was aware that he was offering him at least a hundred thousand dollars, but Mr. Vandeford's hunch about the purple on purple was beginning to cost him dear, though at least a hundred thousand dollars did not seem too much to pay to keep the agony of failure out of a pair of sea-gray eyes that had trusted him the first time they had looked into his.

"With Hawtry it goes; without Hawtry, no, Mr. Vandeford," was the prompt answer.

"With Hawtry six months from now?" questioned Mr. Vandeford.

"It is that I have a weak heart, Mr. Vandeford, and I do not trade in futures," answered Mr. Weiner, with a spark in his black eyes.

"You know my fix, Weiner; now what will you take for the New Carnival October first for my Hawtry show?"

"I will trade that entire 'Rosie Posie Girl' manuscript, with all rights for that New Carnival Theater on October first, with option for the entire season, Mr. Vandeford," said Mr. Weiner, rolling his big cigar from one side of his mouth to the other.

"Without Hawtry?"

"I have a new Hawtry right now—in pickle," Mr. Weiner answered.

"Will the New Carnival certainly be finished October first?"

"Yes, to a certainty of a large guarantee."

"How long will you give me to answer?" asked Mr. Vandeford.

"I have made an appointment with S. & K. to talk that New Carnival Theater for a show at five o'clock to-day, Mr. Vandeford. I will call it six o'clock for you," answered Weiner, as he turned the screw with all show of consideration for his fellow producer.

"I'll be back at four-forty-five," Mr. Vandeford answered him, and with no further good-by took his departure.

Arriving at his office, Mr. Vandeford directed Mr. Meyers that he was to have half an hour entirely undisturbed, entered his own office, and after a second's pause went into the little office that had been assigned to Miss Adair, the author, and sat down in the chair she very seldom occupied, but which was hers by tenancy. On the desk were a pair of silk gloves she had left there the day before, and in a blue vase were several roses in a good state of preservation, which he recognized as having come from a bunch Miss Adair had been wearing after having had luncheon with Mr. Gerald Height on Monday. These objects disturbed Mr. Vandeford vaguely. He put them out of his mind roughly and went into conference with himself sternly. Literally he was weighing the question.

On one side of the balance he laid "The Rosie Posie Girl," which, with Hawtry, was sure to run on Broadway for at least two seasons and make for him a fortune that was indefinitely large and sure. Beside this, its production would insure him a position among the country's really great producers. The show was big enough in conception to admit of a spectacularly artistic treatment, which he had intended to give it so that it would place musical comedy on a plane upon which it had never stood before. He knew himself well enough to know that a real triumph of that kind once accomplished, he would want to turn to other fields of endeavor, and he could see his greater self standing patiently waiting for his lesser to be liberated by the process of climbing out of the very top of the theatrical profession.

Sternly he turned from himself to the filling of the other pan of the scales in which he was weighing the question. He looked for something to put in to over-balance the certainty of "The Rosie Posie Girl," and found nothing but a vast uncertainty with many potentialities. "The Purple Slipper" was a play of no known classification, and with Hawtry in it was still less fish, flesh, fowl, or good red herring. And there was added the uncertainty of that week from the twenty-third to the first during which he had no legal hold on the fair Violet. He felt reasonably sure that the announcement that "The Purple Slipper" would open the big new Weiner theater, with all the clash of publicity which he could give to it, would hold her steady on her job, but as he laid it down on the scales, it had to be classed as an uncertainty. The fifteen per cent. seat sales based on Mr. Gerald Height's appearance in silk tights, velvet, and lace was about the only positive he had to lay in the scales, and that, of course, failed to tip them to any degree. For about fifteen minutes he sat perfectly rigid. Then he gently laid on the uncertain side of the scales the positive and concrete faith in a pair of sea-gray eyes, jeweled with tears, and watched "The Rosie Posie Girl" rise high as "The Purple Slipper" sank down heavily.

After this he took a rose from the green vase, stuck it in his buttonhole, and went forth—into his own office. He there rang his buzzer for Mr. Meyers, and seated himself with the air of a man who has had a burden lifted off his shoulders rather than with the air of one about to give away half a million dollars.

"Pops, 'The Rosie Posie Girl' is sold, lock, stock, and barrel, to Weiner for a month's try-out of 'The Purple Slipper' at the New Carnival Theater, good guarantee for that month, and an option on a run to the limit for eight-thousand-a-week houses. Get Lusky over the 'phone, and you and he have the contracts drawn as tight as wax by four-thirty."

"But, Mr. Vandeford, sir, I must have a say that—"

"No, Pops, don't say anything."

"With a pardon it is that I think that Miss Adair is a very fine lady, and so also 'The Purple Slipper.'" With this incoherent pronouncement of sympathy and encouragement, though devastated at the loss of "The Rosie Posie Girl," upon which he had already spent many creative days, Mr. Meyers departed into the outer office.

For a long minute Mr. Vandeford glared at the unoffending rose in his buttonhole, then smiled, ran his hands through his hair, turned to the telephone, and plunged into the last lap of the race of "The Purple Slipper." Until four o'clock he was closeted with the most brilliant theatrical publicity man in New York City; then he took his contracts and went over to Weiner's office and sacrificed "The Rosie Posie Girl" to—

An hour later he had told his partner, Mr. Dennis Farraday, all about it, and showed him the deeds of execution.

"You ought not to have done it, Van. It was too big a price to pay," Mr. Farraday declared, with his mane rumpled on high.

"No," answered Mr. Vandeford, in happy calmness. "'The Purple Slipper' will pay it all out—one way or another."

"It must," declared Mr. Farraday, with helpless energy. "What can I do?"

"Oh, be the usual ray of sunshine around the place and—and keep the Violet happy and busy until we land on Broadway." Mr. Vandeford said this with a coldness in tone and voice that he had to force hard. His attitude was that he had had to sacrifice himself so why not sacrifice Mr. Farraday also? And he hated himself for that attitude.

"I understand, and you can count on me," answered Mr. Farraday, with such an innocently happy face that Mr. Vandeford groaned inwardly at the fact that he did not understand, and would surely be made to soon if his calculations on the intentions of Miss Hawtry were correct.

"I've arranged for a chair-car to take the whole company down to Atlantic City Sunday morning, so the whole bunch can have a plunge and a good rest-up before the Monday dress rehearsal." Mr. Farraday produced that piece of business with great pride.

"Good!" was all the commendation that he got, and he betook himself off for other good-natured efforts on the affairs of "The Purple Slipper."

Though at times Mr. Godfrey Vandeford approached the heroic in action, he was very human in reflexes and, having paid a price for the happiness of Miss Patricia Adair, he proceeded to partake of as much of that happiness as he could get hold of. He captured the author of "The Purple Slipper" after the rehearsals on Friday, which were the last before the dress rehearsal in Atlantic City on Monday night, because the cast of a play are, after all, so many human beings, who have to be given at least a day for such animal functions as packing trunks, closing apartments, dodging creditors, and severing home ties, and he carried her off to the country with the intention of having her all to himself for dinner at a little inn up Westchester way. After they had started in that direction and were flying behind Valentine along sun-gilded country lanes, he changed his mind, changed the road slightly, and had them landed under the wing of Mrs. Farraday for dinner. He did this with direct intention. He judged himself, and decided that it would be safest to announce to Miss Adair that her play was to have the honor of opening the great New Carnival Theatre on Broadway somewhere within two hundred yards of Mrs. Farraday. This program he carried out with efficient directness and then found a strange lacking in himself.

"Oh, how wonderful you are!" was Miss Adair's exclamation when he had imparted his news just as a young moon was silvering the poplar under which they sat on an old stone bench at the bottom of the sunken garden. "Everybody has said that you couldn't do it, but I didn't worry at all like the rest of them. I knew that you could."

"How did you know that I could do it?" he asked, and he rejoiced with pride that his author did not yet know of either the existence or his sacrifice of "The Rosie Posie Girl."

"Why, I don't know—I knew just because I—I—" For the first time Mr. Vandeford was absolutely certain of the flutter towards him, and at the same time felt certain that he was the first man who ever had been certain of it; and just as his breast and arms were hollowing themselves to nest it he—denied it and himself. He didn't want it at a purchase price, and he took Miss Adair home and locked her in the Y. W. C. A. before midnight.

The journey down to Atlantic City on Sunday morning was accomplished with much joy and hilarity. The entire cast of "The Purple Slipper" acted like boys and girls let out of school, and mischievous children at that. Miss Adair enjoyed it all immensely, and at times she very timidly joined in the fun, which was centering itself upon putting Mr. Leigh of the uncertain feet, and Miss Grayson, the glowerer, into white ribbon bonds, which bonds were supplied from a large box of bonbons, the identity of the donor of which she refused to reveal, though Mr. Kent declared he had brought her to the station in a gold limousine with diamond wheels, and bore the name of Billy Astorbilt.

Only Miss Hawtry held aloof, as she and her maid and various pieces of ultra luggage occupied the four seats at the end of the car. The seat next her was kept vacant, and at various times during the several hours' run Mr. Vandeford, Mr. Height, and Miss Adair occupied it with respectful tribute, but most of the time Mr. Farraday sat considerately beside her, and smiled upon the fun. Mr. William Rooney and Fido rode in the day-coach and worked the entire way on duplicate prompt copies.

Also Mr. Rooney and Fido were absent that evening from the dinner-party given by Mr. Farraday in the great new hotel to the entire cast of "The Purple Slipper"—in honor of Miss Hawtry. They were working with the stage-carpenter, the property-man, and the electrician until a late hour, when they met the members of the dinner-party in pairs in wheel-chairs being trundled along the board-walk for sea air before retiring.

"Hope the angel gave the bunch enough drink to keep 'em asleep until two-thirty to-morrow," Mr. Rooney remarked to Fido as he spat out into the Atlantic Ocean. "I'm going to put the gaff to 'em to-morrow night, and I want to start with 'em unstrung and string 'em to suit myself. That little author is some girl, but I wonder why Vandeford wanted to shunt that white devil onto a nice boob like Farraday, and him his friend, too," he further remarked as he watched the star and the angel being trundled by in one of the big wicker perambulators that infest the board walk.

In the other direction were being trundled the author and the producer of "The Purple Slipper," and at that moment they were in the mood of fellow-workmen at the machine of "The Purple Slipper."

"Rooney sent me word that the lighting is doubtful. This rotten little theater is hard to count on for any kind of unusual lighting, and we must have that diffusion for the dinner scene so as to make the candle effect seem real," Mr. Vandeford was saying with great animation to Miss Adair and with a total lack of sentiment under the same young moon that had baffled him Friday night out in Westchester.

"The whole thing seems a confused jumble to me," admitted Miss Adair. "I feel as if I couldn't wait until to-morrow night to really see the play with the costumes and scenery and love scenes and all in the right place. And yet I'm so tired I feel as if I could sleep a week."

"I'll shake you if you go dead on me here as you did the other night in the car," threatened Mr. Vandeford, with a laugh, but he adjusted his shoulder back of hers as if he considered the danger entirely real.

"I'll certainly do it if you don't take me back where I belong, wherever it is," threatened Miss Adair. "I hope Mildred isn't as—as tired as I am and—and can help me. I'll go to bed with my clothes on if she doesn't," Miss Adair gasped between yawns, and fluttered to Mr. Vandeford with a frank intention of gaining support.

"Back to the hotel, boy, and go a good pace. Double tip," commanded Mr. Vandeford to their propelling Italian youth, with an alarm which puzzled him as much as it would have puzzled many of his friends, while he accorded his exhausted author the amount of support needed for the occasion—and no more.

And as Mr. Rooney had hoped, the entire cast of "The Purple Slipper" slept into the afternoon of the dress-rehearsal day in the complete collapse which the sea air induced, and they were in a good condition for restringing. In fact, some of them began that process for themselves by an afternoon plunge in the ocean.

One of those plunges had an after-effect on the fate of "The Purple Slipper" further than keying up Mr. Gerald Height for his dress rehearsals. When he discovered, while detaining Miss Adair for a chat after his late luncheon, that the author had never beheld the sea before in all her inland existence, and had never been in it, he insisted on procuring a bathing-suit and initiating her into that sport. She assented to the proposition with the greatest eagerness, and in less than half an hour she had trusted herself to the arms of Mr. Gerald Height and the Atlantic Ocean. They were both rough in their handling, and finally she came to resent the boldness of the former as much as she enjoyed that of the latter. With crimson in her cheeks and lightning in her eyes, she first attempted to drown them both, then waded to shore, sat down on the sand, and said things to Mr. Gerald Height, which had the magic effect of making him unburden himself and his lizard-like career to her in its entirety.

"You see, I didn't know what a girl who—who wrote your play was like exactly, and because I couldn't find out I have kept on trying. Now—now, by George, I know," he said, with a boyishness coming into his murky eyes. "Say, you know my mother was a Kentucky girl, and I guess that is one reason I have stuck by this fool—this 'Purple Slipper.' That and wanting to chase you down."

"Well, now that you've 'chased me down' and found that I'm not—not there, you'll stay by me and 'The Purple Slipper,' won't you?" Miss Adair asked, and then like two merry children they both laughed at her jumble.

"I will," answered Mr. Height, with the queer attachment in his heart that a man feels for a perfectly good woman who is jolly and friendly with him after she has allowed him to tell her just how wicked he is or thinks he is. "I thought the whole thing was a flivver, but when Vandeford got the opening of the New Carnival for it, I sat up and took notice. Just you watch the stuff between Hawtry and me put a line a mile long from the box office."

"I'm wild to see you and Miss Hawtry in your scenes, and we must go to dress for early dinner. The rehearsals are called for six-thirty. Thank you for—for being my friend." As she rose from the sand Miss Adair held out her hand to Mr. Height, with the friendliness and confidence in her eyes that had smoothed over other rough, though not so rough, places of the same character in her young life.

"That's some kid and there are lots like her. I've got to halt sooner or later," Mr. Height muttered to himself as he dressed for his early dinner. "I'm going to put this fool play across for her, too." There are a few women who distill loyalty out of declined passion; but not many. They make their mark on their generation.

The dress rehearsals of a play are varied in finish and intensity, but the variety which Mr. William Rooney conducted was of the most brilliant, and he expected them to go as well as the opening night. He made small allowance for the strangeness of lights, scenery, and costuming, and that allowance was only for time, not in smoothness. As he willed, his cast generally performed. The cast of "The Purple Slipper" was of experienced actors, and he felt certain that they would meet his expectations. At six-thirty o'clock he seated himself in the middle seat of the sixth row center, looked around to see that the electrician and the costumer were at hand to catch any criticism he wished to make, and in a crisp hard voice that exploded like a cannon he called up the curtain.

The author was at her post in the left stage box, and bulwarked and buttressed by the producer as usual, while Mr. Dennis Farraday, the angel, sat alone in the box opposite, with a delighted smile on his broad face.

The curtain went up, and "The Purple Slipper" glided on the stage with never a creak or a careen. The lights scintillated and glared on the wonderful costumes and scenery, and the sparkling dialogue began to unwind itself into the startling plot. For the first ten minutes the author glowed with such joyous excitement that the producer felt the actual radiations; then little by little he felt her begin to cool, and a chill ran up and down his own spine as Hawtry and Height held the stage alone in the first dash of Howard-"pepped" dalliance near the last of the first act. He held his breath, frozen within him, until the curtain went down, and then he refused to turn to the author at his side. He was in a panic and undecided what to do until Mr. Rooney relieved him of the need of action.

"Mr. Vandeford," he commanded from the middle of the theater, "get New York on the wire and have Lindenberg start a good scenery man out on the early morning train. That back-drop must have a toning wash: it jumps out at the costumes. Lindenberg is in his office until seven to get a message from you. It's ten to now. You gotter jump."

Without a look at Miss Adair, Mr. Vandeford "jumped," and thus she was left alone to watch the second act grind along to its climax, with Hawtry acting the high-bred virago with an extremity of brilliant sensuality, with Mr. Height supporting her in broad lines that could be well-read between. Once the author looked at Mr. Dennis Farraday in the box opposite, and then looked away from his blazing enjoyment of the startling climax, which the lovers acted in such beauty of body, and such beauty of execution that, without knowing why, she was thrilled from her head to her feet.

"Broad standards," she whispered to encourage herself, as her eyes shone and her cheeks glowed as she lowered her head and re-read the proof of the program to be used on Tuesday night, which Mr. Vandeford had given her and upon which she observed the name Patricia Adair in type only slightly smaller than that of Violet Hawtry. In a few minutes the curtain was again called up; Mr. Vandeford was still absent, and again her attention was riveted to the stage.

Almost the entire first half of the last act was hers, and the tension in her glowing young body had relaxed and she gave Mr. Vandeford a semblance of a smile as he seated himself beside her just before Hawtry came on the scene to lay with Height the foundation of the great dinner scene. This hurdle was held firmly in front of the young author.

Miss Hawtry entered in a blaze of eighteenth century glory, only with her authentic costume cunningly contrived to reveal more of her wonderful white body than any woman of that period would have done, and beautiful in his velvet and ruffles, Gerald Height followed her to thereupon enact a scene which was a slow and marvellous distilling of the very wine of emotion intended to go through human blood like a stinging poison. It had reached its climax, and even the emptiness of the theater was breathless when, like a whip, Mr. Rooney's cold voice brought Miss Hawtry out of Mr. Height's arms.

"Cut it, cut it!" he commanded. "You couldn't get that across even on Broadway. The censor will close the show. Play it fifty per cent. and then all the subway will quit you."

"I'll play it as I choose, you black monkey, you, with your Irish name." Maggie Murphy sprang out from the body of the beautiful Hawtry to answer back gutter with gutter.

"Wait a minute, Miss Hawtry." Mr. Vandeford rose in his box from beside the author of the violent scene that was becoming a basis of a scene of violence. "Rooney, it can be played with—"

"You sit down and help your bread-and-butter baby hide her face for writing such rot instead of trying to tell me how to act." Maggie was now commanding the Violet, and she was wild with nervous rage. "She's welcome to you; five years of your living off me and my work is enough, and I don't intend to—"

"Back to your lines on which Miss Hawtry enters, Miss Lindsey," commanded Mr. Rooney, in his machine-gun manner. "Get ready for your cue, Height."

Completely ignoring Miss Hawtry, who was standing down center, Mildred Lindsey calmly entered and began the beautiful little bit of persiflage with Miss Herne, who had gone on before her with an agility unlike her usual slow gait. There was nothing for Miss Hawtry to do but retire to the wings, which she did, and with the nervous bomb exploded, she continued the rehearsals to a finish with the greatest brilliancy, playing the interrupted scene at fifty per cent. of its fire, as directed by Mr. Rooney.

But the author of "The Purple Slipper" was not there to see the ending in calm after the storm, for she had fled at the Violet's attack upon Mr. Vandeford, and while he stood his ground to see the matter settled in the face of the insult, she had vanished.



CHAPTER VIII

At twelve-thirty Mr. Rooney was still in the theater with his property-man and his electrician, but just before one he left through the stage-door.

"All over, old man, you can put out your lights, lock up, and beat it," he said to the old gentleman who had sat year after year and kept the gates of his Inferno.

"Star still in her dressing-room, gent with her," the old keeper answered, as he leered at Mr. Rooney, and accepted the big black cigar offered him.

"Big, red-headed chap with the show?" Mr. Rooney questioned carelessly.

"Same," admitted the old keeper.

"Cuss her," Mr. Rooney remarked, without either special interest or malice, and took his leisurely way to his hotel.

The star dressing-room at the little Atlantic City theater, in which half the plays produced on Broadway first try out their charm, is larger than the dressing-rooms in most of the modern theaters, and dainty Susette always made any dressing-room which happened to serve Miss Hawtry look more like a boudoir than seemed possible, by taking thought to have silky rose curtains to adjust over costume-racks and windows, with covers to match to be slipped over the couple of rough chairs usually supplied dressing-rooms. A fillet covering large enough for any dressing-table, the silver and ivory of the make-up outfit, and lights shaded with the fillet over rose were about all the equipment that the French girl carried in the top of one of Miss Hawtry's costume trunks, but she managed an effect with them that many a Fifth Avenue decorator might envy. Following instructions, she had put all in exquisite order and left the theater before Miss Hawtry was off the stage. The Violet had been obliged to send her summons to Mr. Dennis Farraday by the old door-keeper; hence his knowledge of her manoeuvers.

Miss Hawtry was still encased in the magnificence of the costume for the final scene of "The Purple Slipper," and in the rose light of the little dressing-room she glowed like a fire-hearted opal as Mr. Dennis Farraday entered with the great hesitation of a first appearance in a stage dressing-room. His face was pale and serious. Miss Hawtry had seen that her Maggie Murphy insult to Mr. Vandeford had apparently cut more deeply into the big Jonathan than into Mr. Vandeford himself, and she had realized that she must set her scene well and act quickly and with daring if she accomplished her purposes.

"Forgive me—and comfort me. I have hurt myself more than I have hurt him," she cried out as she turned to him and expelled two sparkling tears from her great blue eyes, and held out bare, white, glorious arms to him, with the sob of a repentant child caught in her throat.

Now, Mr. Dennis Farraday, great gentleman and the son of a line of gentlemen, was in the same state that many another good man and true would be in after witnessing "The Purple Slipper" as played by Miss Hawtry in her compelling animality, and his angry eyes suddenly blazed with another light than anger, as with a hard breath he admitted the big, beautiful, treacherous cat into his arms and allowed her bare arms to coil around his neck and her body to cling to his.

"How could you—how can you?" he asked, and the question on his lips made them cold, and kept them from hers—long enough.

Mr. Vandeford stood in the dressing-room door without so much as rapping for permission to enter, and his face was dead white while his eyes blazed in a great terror. He seemed not to notice the purport of the scene he had interrupted, but his voice cut into the situation like cold steel.

"Denny, we can't find Miss Adair anywhere, and here's a note she left Miss Lindsey. What do you make of it?" He handed Mr. Farraday a sheet of hotel note-paper, which he took with a trembling hand while Miss Hawtry shrank back against her lace-covered dressing-table and gathered her forces to annihilate Mr. Vandeford. This was the note, which Mr. Farraday read with one glance, but failed to read to Miss Hawtry, because its few lines struck all consciousness of her existence entirely from his mind.

Dear Mildred:

Dishonor has never smirched the name of Adair until I put it on that theater program. I have branded the annals of my family, and I never want to look into a human face again. Good-by. You've been good to me.

PATRICIA.

"My God! What do you suppose she means?" Mr. Farraday gasped, as he looked in abject terror at Mr. Vandeford, who returned his glance in kind.

"And I promised Roger to take care of her," Mr. Farraday gasped, and without so much as a glance at Miss Hawtry, both men departed with all the rapidity possible. There must be some reason that all bonds without-the-law are so brittle, and those of friendship and honor and love so strong within the code.

Miss Hawtry did some rapid thinking, as unaided, she slipped from the costume of the star of "The Purple Slipper" into her normal raiment and character. Then she called a wheel-chair and had herself trundled to the hotel. While she was propelled, many other wheels were turning and turning fast.

"What does Miss Lindsey think is the matter, and where she is?" Mr. Farraday questioned Mr. Vandeford as they strode along together down the board-walk towards the hotel.

"She says it's that rotten scene between Hawtry and Height that's killed her, and she is right. I felt her die right there by my side," Mr. Vandeford answered.

"You two don't think she would really put an end to—to herself about a play, do you?" demanded Mr. Farraday, and he fairly staggered as he asked the question. Then not waiting for an answer, he began to run toward the entrance of the hotel half a block ahead. Just as he was turning into the doors with Mr. Vandeford closely following, an Italian wheel-chair boy darted out of the dusk of his stand, and plucked the latter by the sleeve; then together they went racing back the way Mr. Vandeford had come.

Half way down the long arbor, dusky under its vines, Mr. Farraday met Miss Lindsey, and in the subdued light they paused and looked into each other's faces; then entirely to the surprise of them both, they went into each other's arms and clung together like two frightened children. Miss Lindsey was smothering sobs which made her tender breast storm against Mr. Farraday's, in whose own a heart was racing with terror.

"I don't blame her; it was loathsome, and it was about her own grandmother," Miss Lindsey managed to say in a fierce, beautiful voice.

"You don't think, do you, that—" Mr. Farraday was gasping as he held Miss Lindsey still tighter against the racing heart, which was beginning to slow down and pound against hers with a slightly different speed. However, the terror in his voice made Miss Lindsey press him to her with sustaining closeness.

"She's Southern and different, and I don't know what to think," she was saying, and in the absorption of their terror they failed to notice that Miss Hawtry passed them not six feet away in her wicker chair.

And while they clung to each other and enjoyed their fright and anxiety together, Miss Hawtry went into the telephone-booth and got a long-distance connection with Mr. Weiner in New York in an incredibly short time. Their conversation was almost as incredibly short in view of its portentousness, but while it lasted, Mr. Gerald Height and Mr. William Rooney had been added to the group of anxiety under the arbor, and they were all in close conclave, though not in embrace, when Miss Hawtry returned to them, walking with cool determination in every step.

"Mr. Farraday," Miss Hawtry said, with a serenity in her rich voice and manner, "I will have to tell you as Mr. Vandeford's partner in 'The Purple Slipper' that I am entirely dissatisfied with the way the play proves up at dress rehearsal and refuse to open in it. As I am under no contract to him since Saturday night, I am motoring back to New York to-night to begin rehearsals to-morrow in 'The Rosie Posie Girl' for Mr. Weiner. Good-night!" With a stately curtsy to the assembled principals of "The Purple Slipper," very dramatic in execution, the Violet bowed herself away from them forever. Ten minutes after she was on her way back to Manhattan in a big touring-car provided by the hotel management per a telephone order from Mr. Weiner of New York.

"And Van sold 'The Rosie Posie Girl,' for her opening on Broadway in the New Carnival Theater with 'The Purple Slipper,'" Mr. Farraday gasped as he sat down suddenly on one of the benches in the dim little arbor.

"Lord, what a lose, both shows and maybe—maybe Miss Adair, too," Mr. Gerald Height exclaimed, and there were both sympathy and anxiety in his voice.

"Oh, I don't know," said Mr. Rooney, as he rolled his fat cigar from the left of his mouth to the right and spat into the vines. "I've made a pretty good play out of 'The Purple Slipper.' It will go all right without her. Actors aren't so much. It's the situation and the stage-managing."

"That's what you think," jeered Mr. Gerald Height, gloomily. "I always had a hunch that I would never play wig and ruffles."

"Can that hunch," commanded Mr. Rooney. "I'm going to put Miss Lindsey in the part and play it refined for a winner. Been understudying Miss Hawtry, haven't you, Miss Lindsey?"

"Yes," answered Miss Lindsey, and a sudden radiance shone from her dark, intellectual face that lit up the whole arbor and lighted a flame in the creative hearts of both Mr. Gerald Height and Mr. William Rooney. And what it lighted in the hearts of both of those gentlemen was nothing to the blaze it fanned in the heart of Mr. Dennis Farraday, where it had been smouldering along from a spark touched off the day of the beefsteak and mushrooms. "If you'll help me play it as I have seen it all along, Mr. Rooney, I can go on to-morrow night."

"Good," agreed Mr. Rooney. "I'll shove Miss Grayson up into your part, and cut out hers until we get a girl. We'll get the little author busy right now, blotting out the Hawtry smell and putting you in, as I say, refined and—"

"Oh, but where is she?" moaned Mr. Farraday, coming back to his agony of uneasiness, which had been drugged by hearing and seeing "The Purple Slipper" and Mr. Vandeford's fortunes rescued and reconstructed right before his ears and eyes.

"There ain't but two places for a refined lady to run in Atlantic City,—the railroad station and the ocean,—and I bet Mr. Vandeford is lugging her from the railroad station right now," Mr. Rooney said with easy conviction. "Course she'd dodge back to the Christian ladies home the first mud-puddle she stepped into, but we'll set her on her feet and rub the splashes off her white stockings and—"

Mr. Rooney was interrupted in his kindly flow of reassurance by the appearance of a wheel-chair propelled by the shrewd Italian youth, who had that evening made his individual fortune, in which sat Mr. Vandeford and the author of "The Purple Slipper." Without command, he stopped beside the group of friends, and Mr. Vandeford alighted, but Miss Adair shrank back into the shadow of the perambulator.

"Oh, darling, listen," cried Miss Lindsey, as she reached into that retreat and drew Miss Adair into her arms. "Miss Hawtry has thrown up the part and gone back to New York, and I am going to act it for you just as you and I have talked about it all this time. Mr. Rooney is going to help us, and we—we are going to make good for you—and Mr. Vandeford—to-morrow night. We are!"

"Just watch us, Miss Adair. I'll do my best, and I'll—I'll be like we talked the other day," Mr. Height said as he came to the other side of the wicker retreat of the hunted author. Something in his voice made Mr. Dennis Farraday put his arm around the lizard's shoulders, a thing he would not have thought of doing a week ago.

"We are all going to stand by, little girl, and it'll be some play that we produce at the New Carnival October first," Mr. Farraday put in by way of his contribution to the wounded young author.

However, it was the crack of Mr. Rooney's whip that brought her to her feet again.

"Miss Adair, you and Lindsey come back with me to the theater now," he commanded the shrinking and tragic author. "Somebody get Fido and tell him to wake up everybody and have 'em all at the theater to rehearse in a hour; that'll be three o'clock. Mr. Vandeford, you'd better get in a press story over long distance before Hawtry beats you to it. You may catch a morning paper or two. Now, everybody get out and work like fun and we'll show Broadway a sure-fire hit October first."

"Can you do it, Bill?" Mr. Vandeford asked in a quiet voice. It was the first time he had spoken since he had coolly and silently picked Miss Adair up off a bench in the little railroad station and put her into the sympathetic young Dago's one-man-power conveyance.

"I can take ten yards of calico, a pot of red wagon paint, and a pretty gal and make a show to fill any theater on Broadway for six months—if I'm let alone," answered Mr. Rooney, with the assurance that moves mountains. "That Lindsey is one good actor with common horse-sense, and the little author filly has Blue-grass speed. Watch us!"

"Goes!" answered Mr. Vandeford, and steel sparks struck out in his keen eyes as he turned and went rapidly to one of the long-distance telephone booths with which all Atlantic City keeps up its intimate relations with New York. It was also astonishing how quickly he got his connection with a great New York morning paper and was put on the desk wire of one of the junior editors, who was a good friend in need.

. . . . . .

"Hello, Curt. Godfrey Vandeford speaking."

. . . . . .

"With my show in Atlantic City. Can you get a note across in the morning issue?"

. . . . . .

"Good! Spread it that Hawtry is put out of 'The Purple Slipper' cast to give place to a new Pacific Coast star, Mildred Lindsey. Hawtry handed it to Denny and me rotten, but put that under pretty deep, with Lindsey blazed in top lines. I'll have my publicity man send you a special Lindsey Sunday story. Hot stuff."

. . . . . .

"Thanks, old man! By!"

* * * * *

Another fifteen minutes was spent in long distance communication with Mr. Meyers, and it was ten minutes after three o'clock in the morning when Mr. Vandeford slipped into his chair beside his author in the little Atlantic City Theater, which Mr. Rooney had induced the old night watchman door-keeper to open up at the hour when all teeming Atlantic City is in the depths of repose. Mr. Rooney had with him the entire cast of "The Purple Slipper," to whom he had just finished explaining the cause of their extraction from their well-earned repose.

"Most of the Sister Harriet scenes are with me," Miss Bebe Herne was saying, with efficient energy fairly radiating from her big body, clothed in a decorous tailor skirt, but with a boudoir jacket serving for blouse. Also two kid curlers showed at the nape of her neck. "I can feed Miss Grayson into Miss Lindsey's part enough to get by to-morrow—to-night I mean. And Wallace can do the same when he's on with her. That ugly white cat Hawtry to double on Godfrey Vandeford after he pulled her out of Weehawken!"

"Get on, get on, everybody, and use your brains until they lather," commanded Mr. Rooney as he took his stand beside the left stage box. "Now, Miss, you gimme lines out of your head or your first draft when I call for 'em, and I'll take 'em or leave 'em as suits me. Then you smooth the ones I hand you into good talk, and we'll have a show here by sun-up that you'll be proud to invite your Christian lady friends to attend. And we'll keep all the 'pep' too, Vandeford, that you paid Howard to write into it, only we'll take the Hawtry dirt out of it. On, Betty Carrington, and the curtain's up."

Then from three o'clock in the morning until almost noon the machinery of "The Purple Slipper" was overhauled and adjusted to the new cog. Mr. Rooney lashed and rubbed and polished and oiled with never a let-up on anybody, and beside him sat the author, with her head up and the bit in her mouth. For every line that rang untrue in the reconstruction she had a true one or she took a crude bit from Mr. Rooney and polished it into place. Fido sat crouched in a front seat and transcribed every word into his prompt copy so as to be a veritable first aid.

And Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, experienced show man that he was, felt as if he was witnessing a miracle as he beheld Miss Adair's original "Purple Slipper," with its haphazard amateur charm, again put forth bud and bloom on the branches of Grant Howard's tight-knit, well-constructed, and well-rounded drama. The highly-colored flowers of Hawtry personality Mr. Rooney pruned away and constructed others for Lindsey, and Miss Adair lent them color and perfume in passing them to the new star, who was working steadily, slowly, surely, and with great power.

"Don't tell him that his eyes 'burn into yours until your soul is seared.' That's old. We got to get a kind of smile here where Hawtry looked like she was going to do the ham sandwich act to Height and his silk tights." Mr. Rooney stopped the abhorred scene, being acted along about six o'clock in the morning, to demand that it be played in the proper key, up to which he had succeeded in wringing lines from Miss Adair for the first act and most of the second. "What do hearts do to each other that's hot and decent and funny all at once?" Mr. Rooney fired this biological question to the author of "The Purple Slipper," and looked at her with a demand for an immediate answer in his little, black, driving eyes.

"She can say 'There's chaff in my heart; guard the fire in yours,'" Miss Adair supplied offhand.

"That hands it to him, and a good double meaning, too," Mr. Rooney approved. "Go ahead, Height, but don't get this lady mixed with the other kind. Remember, she lives at the ladies Christian home." The laugh that greeted this sally was an uproar that added to the dash and quick fire of the big scene, which Miss Adair and Mr. Rooney had so quickly expurgated and reconstructed between them.

At seven o'clock the play had been entirely run through, and Fido had the result in his prompt copy and was beginning to rapidly write it into their lines for each of the cast.

"One half hour to get breakfast and Miss Herne's back hair down," Mr. Rooney said, with the callousness of a slave-driver. "Then if you run through again fairly well we'll be done by noon, and everybody can hit the hay for six hours."

Mr. Vandeford watched his author's proud little head droop on the box rail in front of her, and with his face very white he motioned Mr. Farraday to come to her. After his degrading the night before at the hands of Miss Hawtry, he felt that he would be unable to endure the pain of the repulsion he felt sure he would find in her eyes if she ever looked at him again.

But his summons of Mr. Farraday failed in peremptoriness, for that big, bonny gentleman nodded to him, then stood in the wing to catch Miss Lindsey in his arms and bear her away to immediate nourishment. In the excitement of the last few hours a domesticity had grown up between Mr. Farraday and Miss Lindsey that it would have taken months to build in a world less hectic than that in which they were then living.

Their courtship had been brief, and consisted in one question, asked by Mr. Farraday while Miss Lindsey stood in the wings waiting for a moderated, impassioned cue from Mr. Height, and answered by her as she responded to him and the call of her stage lover at the same moment.

"When will you marry me?"

"When 'The Purple Slipper' goes on Broadway."

In the circumstances it was natural that Mr. Dennis Farraday should take Miss Lindsey for a reminiscent beefsteak and mushrooms during the only free half hour she would have for either him or food in the ensuing day, and to fail to heed Mr. Vandeford's summon.

Thus deserted, Mr. Vandeford was about to steal forth and appeal to some member of the cast of "The Purple Slipper" to come to his rescue in providing refreshment to restore the author during the precious half hour respite when "the chaff in his heart" caught fire and began to burn away forever. Miss Adair raised her eyes to his, with the faith still in their wounded depths, and smiled a wan little smile.

"Please get me a glass of milk with an egg in it, and some of that brown-bread turkey," she demanded. "I'm dead, but I'll come alive again if I go to sleep a minute. Shake me when you get back with it, but get something for yourself while you are gone."

"The kiddie, the precious, spunky kiddie," Mr. Vandeford said in his heart over and over as he and the young Italian rushed to the hotel and back with a waiter and a tray of the desired refreshment, to which had been added an iced melon and a couple of bedewed roses.

The shaking had to be literally administered while young Dago Italiana held the tray, and then had to be repeated several times by Mr. Vandeford, as he almost as literally fed his exhausted author, up until the very minute in which Mr. Rooney rang up the curtain and again called her into action.

Five hours was more than enough for the smooth running of the three-hour "Purple Slipper" show, and at eleven o'clock Mr. Rooney dismissed his jaded cast with this strict command delivered in his rich, deep voice, which held a note of genuine solemnity.

"All of you go to sleep every minute between now and night, and then come back here and make good—for all of us."

With the assistance of young Dago Italiana, Mr. Vandeford delivered Miss Adair to a hotel maid, who accepted five dollars from him as a fee for putting her to bed, and then he plunged into still greater strenuosities.

He sat for three hours with his skilled young publicity man and advance-agent, and laid out a discreet, dignified, but very interesting, publicity campaign for the new star of "The Purple Slipper." Due importance was to be given in all the notices that "The Purple Slipper" was to open the New Carnival Theater and in his heart the young advertiser put away the intention of making the fact that Mr. Vandeford had sold Hawtry and "The Rosie Posie Girl" for "The Purple Slipper," his most brilliant reserve story to set all of Broadway, at least, agog for the opening of the expensive new play.

"It puts 'The Purple Slipper' at the big end of the horn, and it's not your fault that there is only the little end of the horn left for 'The Rosie Posie Girl' for the time being," he explained to Mr. Vandeford. "You see, it is a kind of double-cross that acts both ways. If it goes, people will think it was worth your paying a big price for, and if it fails, they'll think the 'Rosie Posie Girl' couldn't have been much if you traded a chance on such a poor show for it."

"Goes!" said Mr. Vandeford, but he was aware that the smart manoeuver, which would once have delighted his soul, made him intensely weary.

In fact, so fatigued did he feel when he left this young press schemer, that he dropped into his bed for an hour, and had a masseur come and pound him into condition to go to the train with good Dennis Farraday to meet Mrs. Farraday, Mrs. and Mr. and Miss Van Tyne, who arrived at five o'clock from big Manhattan. Mr. Farraday had had a like operation performed upon himself, and was in such a radiant condition that Mr. Vandeford felt badly eclipsed beside him.

"What does it all mean about Miss Hawtry and Miss Lindsey and the show, Van?" Mrs. Farraday questioned, with greater anxiety in her face than she had had at any other opening night of her favorite's successful shows. "Are we going to have a terrible time?"

"I'm going to put you in a wheel-chair and let Denny take you up to the north end of the board-walk and tell you all about it while I locate and make comfortable the rest of the folks," Mr. Vandeford answered with a deep relief at her presence in his eyes.

"Where are my girls?" she questioned.

"Both dead—asleep," he answered, as if deeply happy to be able to say it of his star and his author.

His statement was only partly true, for while Miss Adair slept the sleep of the emotionally unanxious, Mildred Lindsey sat crouched by her window, with her eyes looking far out over the Atlantic Ocean, waiting for the result of Mr. Dennis Farraday's talk with his mother at the north end of the board-walk.

There are occasionally mothers who bear sons who can tell them all about things, and Mrs. Farraday really enjoyed the whole story that big, bonnie Dennis poured out to her at the sunset hour by the brink of old ocean, Dago Italiana squatting on his heels out of hearing and basking in inactivity, from the moment of the beefsteak episode in his and Miss Lindsey's acquaintance up to the moment in which Miss Hawtry had established herself in his arms on the occasion of his debut in a stage dressing-room. And even at that stage of the narration she rather astonished Mr. Farraday, who was shamefaced enough at the telling, by saying with soft pity in her motherly voice:

"The poor woman. Of course she couldn't help loving you, and now she's lost both Van and you. Now go on and tell me about Mildred."

"She—she's the best ever," was Mr. Farraday's explicit and enlightening answer.

"Of course she is. I saw that the time you brought her to dinner with me, and also that you were in love with her. She's really a rather wonderful girl, and—and—Dennis, I'll tell you something that I never expected to tell you—I've always wanted to be an actress. I simply adore that Lindsey girl, and I know she'll make a great actress. Why on earth should she want to marry you?" Which goes to show that aristocratic Mrs. Farraday was not the ordinary mother.

"Let's go ask her," roared big Dennis, as he embraced her in a way that made the sympathetic and now wealthy young Dago Italiana flash his white teeth in joy.

And nobody can say how much the fate of "The Purple Slipper" was affected by the fact that Rosalind went upon the stage for her first appearance as a star, straight from the tender arms of stately, white-haired Mrs. Farraday.

The opening night of "The Purple Slipper," by Patricia Adair, produced by Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, and staged by Mr. William Rooney, was a triumph undisputed and acknowledged by a brilliant cosmopolitan audience such as Atlantic City furnishes any play presented to it before September the twenty-fifth, for up until that week on the board-walk of that resort East meets West and the South joins them. The eminent author sat in the left stage box with Mrs. Justus Farraday of New York and Mr. and Mrs. Derick Van Tyne, and at her side was a chair into which at times dropped Mr. Dennis Farraday, but which had been reserved for the producer. Things had gone brilliantly from the start, from the moment the curtain went up with polished, interesting Miss Herne manoeuvering the frightened and substituted Betty Carrington through the opening dialogue. A veritable gasp of joy had greeted the beautiful Mr. Gerald Height as he entered in his colonial wig, ruffles, and velvet, and his big eyes under their bowed brows sought out the author and smiled at her with a genuine pledge of loyalty which no lizard could ever have given forth as he glided richly into his archaic banter with Miss Herne.

"He'll get 'em going, get 'em going the whole dame bunch from Harlem to the Battery," muttered Mr. Rooney to Fido, who stood in the wings, with his eyes glued to the much annotated prompt copy. "Now watch out for Lindsey; she's doing forty sides of new stuff in twenty hours. Me for the stock company to train 'em young. Let her rip, Rosalind!" And with a nod Mr. Rooney sent his "bet" out upon the stage to make the audience forget that they had paid their money to see Violet Hawtry and make them glad to have paid it to see her.

As Mildred Lindsey stepped out on the stage in all the glory of an almost unbelievable beauty, Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, who sat with his shoulder back of that of the author of his play, seemed to behold a vision with his trained theatrical foresight. This slender, powerful young woman, with the rose dusk of the prairie sun on her cheeks, the depths of the great canons in her dark eyes, and the breadth of the far horizons across her broad brow seemed to him to typify the rise of order in her profession, over which so long had ruled chaos. And as her rich voice led the intrigued audience from one brilliant scene to another, in which she reincarnated before their eyes a very flower of the old Southern chivalry with dash, finish, and lucidity, he felt as if he had done his best and now had a right to be allowed to depart in peace from the world of tinsel and illusion. As Lindsey and Height held the audience spell-bound while the tempted wife dueled with her might against the tender and desperate lover, placing, with a combined art that was as great as any he had ever witnessed, the "big scene" of "The Purple Slipper" among the "big scenes" of the modern stage instead of in the class of lascivious masterpieces where the night before Hawtry had laid it, Mr. Vandeford looked down into the gray eyes of the girl who had had it all in her blood for generations, and who had so brilliantly given it birth, and felt a prophecy rise within him that soon the American drama would begin to draw on the wealth of tradition which had been piling up in a vast storage for it, and that when it did, dramatists and actors, men and women, would rise to interpret it to a wondering world.

"Is it really mine?" she asked him, in proud surprise and wonder.

"Yes, it's yours—filtered through Howard and Rooney and all the rest, but—it—is—you," he answered. "You lost it a dozen times, but—his own comes back to a man or a woman."

His eyes blazed so that the long lashes lowered over the stars in hers, and she saw the curtain fall on the last scene in a mist of tears. The onrush of applause that raised the curtain half a dozen times was confused in her by the pounding of Mr. Vandeford's heart back of her shoulder and the echo in her own.

"Fifty weeks and then some, Van," she heard the young press-agent declare, in business-like congratulation.

"Sure-fire hit," Mr. Rooney pronounced, as he spat on the stage floor behind the curtain. "Rehearsals at ten to-morrow to tighten up, Fido. Me for the hay." Miss Adair had gone back of the footlights to cast her gratitude into his arms, and he had failed to notice her appearance in any way at all, but had spat and gone on his autocratic way. Perhaps in the New World of the Theater, stage-managers may be able to afford to be human, perhaps not.

Mr. Vandeford's supper-party to the cast of "The Purple Slipper" and the friends from New York who had come down to see its try-out, lasted until two o'clock in the morning, but when it was over neither the moon, which was as full that night as Mr. Kent had become by coffee and cigars, nor Dago Italiana had retired, and both stayed on their jobs out at the south end of the board walk, where boards melt off into sand and ocean and sky.

Mr. Godfrey Vandeford had got about two thirds of the way along the painful stretch of autobiography, with which he was inflicting agony on himself by recounting to Miss Adair, when she raised her gray eyes to his with the faith and reverence still at their average level, even slightly higher, and stopped his punishment.

"I understand exactly why people like you and Miss Hawtry don't marry each other," she astonished him by saying in all calmness. "Mr. Height explained it all to me the other day. Actors and actresses have peculiar temperaments that fly together when they ought not to, and fly apart when they ought to stay together. I know just how that is because I feel—"

"Hush!" commanded Mr. Vandeford, as he laid his hands on the shoulders of his author, who was standing close to him, with the moonlight full on her clear-cut, high-bred face, and he gave her a savage shake. "The whole crazy bunch will have to have law and order shot into 'em or the theatrical profession will follow horse-racing to the devil. If they don't give up unfaith and the double-cross Broadway will open some night and swallow them all. And here you come out of a real world and say to me—"

"What did you think I was going to say?" demanded Miss Adair, pressing so close to him that it was impossible for him to administer another shake.

"I don't know and I don't want to hear it. I'm afraid to have you say anything to me."

"It was this: I was going to ask you what I would have done if you had been married to Miss Hawtry when I got to you and we had begun to produce our play together. It's different when men and women work together! Standards have to be broader. How do I know that I would have run away to—"

"Don't, don't!" pleaded Mr. Vandeford as she crept still nearer to him and forcibly tried to open his arms for herself. "I'm punished. I've taught you myself! When I leave you how'll I ever know if I'm going to find you there when I come back?"

"Well, how'd you expect to find me—me—there if you don't take me there?" Miss Adair pleaded as she tugged at his folded arms, with such energy that her polished thumb-nail slightly marked his iron wrists.

"I'm not worthy, child, I'm not worthy," Mr. Vandeford answered with grim words, and his arms still taut against his breast.

"You have to judge yourself with the same—same 'broad standards' I judge you by, like you told me to use. Please open your arms!"

"I take those broad standards away from you."

"Jesus Christ gave them to me, only I didn't understand in Adairville."

"God, I wish you had never left Adairville."

"I know what there is for us to do."

"What?"

"I'll go back and marry you by Adairville narrow standards for better and for worse, and then we'll have to keep 'em for ourselves when we come back, because we did it knowing what we know, but let other people be broad wherever they are without judging them. I'm going to drop asleep right here on the sand if you don't open your arms."

"Oh, good Lord, what did You make women out of?" Mr. Vandeford said in all reverence and bewilderment, as he took the "white flame" to his breast and drew it past her lips until it burned away all the chaff in his soul and established itself upon its altar.

After Mr. Vandeford had again delivered his author to the hopeful maid, waiting up for another greenback, he met Mr. Rooney at the desk of the hotel still on his way to "the hay."

"Closed up with Weiner to begin rehearsing 'The Rosie Posie Girl' on Tuesday, after we open 'The Purple Slipper' in the New Carnival. Said Hawtry wouldn't sign up until I had signed too. She's got a hunch for me. If you fail, their show goes in in your place; if you win, Weiner shunts John Drew or Arliss out to one of his other theaters on the road, and puts in 'The Rosie Posie Girl.' Good business, eh?" And Mr. Rooney rolled his cigar from east to west and questioned Mr. Vandeford, with a new fire for a new undertaking beginning to burn in his little black eyes.

"Fine," answered Mr. Vandeford, with all cordiality, and not even thinking of his lost thousands. "It will go big, Rooney, and I'll be glad—none gladder."

"Sure," answered Mr. Rooney. "It's all in the business. Everybody on Broadway is out to stab everybody else—but mostly it's paper daggers if you take it right."

"A tissue-paper world sewed together with tinsel thread," Mr. Vandeford murmured, as he fell asleep with his cheek pillowed on the wrist that Miss Adair had marked in the struggle for her own.

A week from that night "The Purple Slipper" had its first night on Broadway, and opened the New Carnival Theater in a blaze of glory, publicity, and electric lights. The talented young press-agent had done his work well, and the audience assembled was the most brilliant possible, made up of the usual blase critics, eager theatrical people who were not on the boards themselves, and interested and distinguished men and women from many outer worlds. In the box facing the one occupied by Mrs. Justus Farraday, in a blaze of both the Farraday and Justus jewels and prestige, and the beautiful young author of the play, with her son Mr. Dennis Farraday, and the producer, Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, sat Miss Violet Hawtry with Mr. Weiner, the owner of the beautiful new theater which was opening its doors for the first time on Broadway. When the curtain fell upon the new Lindsey star after its eighth elevation, the Violet rushed behind the scenes and took that astonished young woman in her arms, with the real tears of emotion, with which one genuine artist greets another, in her great blue eyes.

"You were wonderful, my dear, perfectly wonderful," she exclaimed. "You see, Van, I never could have done it like that. Good luck to both of you, and the little author—oh, there you are, my dear! All of you shake hands with Mr. Weiner. He's so pleased that he is speechless, but he's going to give you a big banquet on your fiftieth performance. He's promised me."

Which demonstration was perfectly in keeping with Miss Hawtry and Maggie Murphy's character, and emanated from that quality within her that a month later put "The Rosie Posie Girl" up as high and as brilliant in electric lights as "The Purple Slipper," and kept it there an entire year. Which goes to prove that the "tissue paper world" is yet of heroic fibre.

When Mr. Vandeford went to insert his author into the international safety that evening at about the hour of midnight, he saw that his friend the secretary was shooing a chattering party of Christian ladies, who, as his guests, had sat in a group, fifth row center, in the New Carnival Theater that evening, off up-stairs. With his talisman key, which had never left his pocket since it had been presented to him, in his hand, he paused to speak in a friendly shadow to his successful and now truly eminent playwright.

"You'll have to go South Thursday, and I'll follow Sunday to get that little marriage business over in Adairville before we leave for the Klondike. My commission has arrived from Washington, and the Secretary of the Navy wants quick reports of the copper before the big freeze. Do you suppose I can keep you warm in Eskimo furs and—and my heart?"

"Yes," answered Miss Adair, with the flutter which Mr. Vandeford now answered, without any conscious volition. "There ought to be a great play out of the Klondike. Jack London could have done it, but—but—" the faithful gray eyes were raised to his with the flame in their depths.

With a groan, but an answering flame, Mr. Vandeford replied:

"It's a fatal drag—. Yes. Some day we'll come back and try to put across another one!"

THE END

* * * * *

Transcriber's note

The following changes have been made to the text:

Page 12: "marischino" changed to "maraschino".

Page 14: "plenty ruffles" changed to "plenty of ruffles".

Page 14: "nee" changed to "nee".

Page 29: "heatrical" changed to "theatrical".

Page 37: "mocking bird" changed to "mockingbird".

Page 40: "Highcliffe" changed to "Highcliff".

Page 42: "Vanderford" changed to "Vandeford".

Page 57: "Madamoiselle" changed to "Mademoiselle".

Page 58: "Madamoiselle" changed to "Mademoiselle".

Page 61: "atinkle" changed to "atwinkle".

Page 67: "Highcliffe" changed to "Highcliff".

Page 90: "coemployer's" changed to "co-employer's".

Page 114: "Fou get Gerald" changed to "You get Gerald".

Pages 118-119: "ear of his coproducer" changed to "ear of his co-producer".

Page 125: "Lindenberger" changed to "Lindenberg".

Page 145: "I'd going to" changed to "I'm going to".

Page 193: "She's geting along" changed to "She's getting along".

Page 220: "the he Christian" changed to "the Christian".

Page 236: "touseled" changed to "tousled"

Page 237: "manila envelop" changed to "manila envelope".

Page 245: "Vanderford" changed to "Vandeford".

Page 307: "tryout" changed to "try-out".

Page 373: "Esquimo" changed to "Eskimo".

THE END