your places. Take your places!"—and the rehearsal began,—Don sauntered out into the sunny glare of the calcium light and saw Miss Morris coming across the boards toward him, a haughty English beauty in a summer gown, under a flowered parasol. He raised his hat to her, smiling gallantly.
She dropped her handkerchief, startled by the change which the grease-paint and the false moustache and the fine clothes had made in him. He picked it up for her, with a flourish. He shook hands with her, shoulder-high. "May I have the pleasure of a turn on the Strand with you?" he asked gaily. "Most certainly. I should be delighted!" she replied, in the game; and they returned together to the wings. Miss Morris gone nervous with the knowledge that the stage manager had been watching their by-play.
"All right," he said to them gruffly. "Leave that business in. It'll do. Go ahead." He called to the others: "Not so fast there. This 's no foot race."
Pittsey warned them, when they met in the opposite wings: "You're in luck that he didn't call you down. You'd better not put in anything else that you don't get from him."
Don slapped his leg with his cane. "Had to do it," he laughed. "I couldn't leave the lady to pick up her own handkerchief."
But he did almost leave it to her to pick up, on the opening night of the play; for as soon as he stepped out on the stage, he was aware that the footlights stood at the mouth of a black cave from which the audience, like some huge animal with a thousand pairs of eyes,
