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“I don’t see–“

“If he hadn’t,” she said, “I wouldn’t be here!”

“God bless old Mr. Packer!”

“I hope you mean it, Mr. Canby.” She blushed again, because there was no possible doubt that he meant it. “It seems a miracle to me that I am here, and that my chance is here with me, at last. It’s twice as good a chance as it was yesterday, thanks to you. You’ve given me such beautiful new things to do and such beautiful new things to say. How I’ll work at it! After rehearsal this afternoon I’ll learn every word of it in the tunnel before I get to my station in Brooklyn. That’s funny, too, isn’t it; the first time I’ve ever been to New York I go and board over in Brooklyn! But it’s a beautiful place to study, and by the time I get home I’ll know the lines and have all the rest of the time for the real work: trying to make myself into a faraway picture of the adorable girl you had in your mind when you wrote it. You see–“

She checked herself again. “Oh! Oh!” she said, half-laughing, half-ashamed. “I’ve never talked so much in my life! You see it seems to me that the whole world has just burst into bloom!”

She radiated a happiness that was almost tangible; it was a glow so real it seemed to warm and light that dingy old passageway. Certainly it warmed and lighted the young man who stood there with her. For him, too, the whole world was transfigured, and life just an orchard to walk through in perpetual April morning.

The voice of Packer proclaimed: “Two o’clock, ladies and gentlemen! Rehearsal two o’clock this afternoon!”

The next moment he looked into the passageway. “This afternoon’s rehearsal, two o’clock, Miss–ahh–Malone. Oh, Mr. Canby, Mr. Potter wants you to go to lunch with him and Mr. Tinker. He’s waiting. This way, Mr. Canby.”

“In a moment,” said the young playwright. “Miss Malone, you spoke of your going home to work at making yourself into ‘the adorable girl’ I had in my mind when I wrote your part. It oughtn’t”–he faltered, growing red–“it oughtn’t to take much– much work!”

And, breathless, he followed the genially waiting Packer.

X

“Your overcoat, Mr. Potter!” called that faithful servitor as Potter was going out through the theatre with old Tinker and Canby. “You’ve forgotten your overcoat, sir.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Yes sir; but it’s a little raw to-day.” He leaped down into the orchestra from the high stage, striking his knee upon a chair with violence, but, pausing not an instant for that, came running up the aisle carrying the overcoat. “You might want it after you get out into the air, Mr. Potter. I’m sure Mr. Tinker or Mr. Canby won’t mind taking charge of it for you until you feel like putting it on.”

“Lord! Don’t make such a fuss, Packer. Put it on me–put it on me!”

He extended his arms behind him, and was enveloped solicitously and reverently in the garment.

“Confound him!” said Potter good-humouredly, as they came out into the lobby. “It is chilly; he’s usually right, the idiot!”

Turning from Broadway, at the corner, they went over to Fifth Avenue, where Potter’s unconsciousness of the people who recognized and stared at him was, as usual, one of the finest things he did, either upon the stage or “off.” Superb performance as it was, it went for nothing with Stewart Canby, who did not even see it, for he walked entranced, not in a town, but through orchards in bloom.

If Wanda Malone had remained with him, clear and insistent after yesterday’s impersonal vision of her at rehearsal, what was she now, when every tremulous lilt of the zither-string voice, and every little gesture of the impulsive hands, and every eager change of the glowing face, were fresh and living, in all their beautiful reality, but a matter of minutes past? He no longer resisted the bewitchment; he wanted all of it. His companions and himself were as trees walking, and when they had taken their seats at a table in the men’s restaurant of a hotel where he had never been, he was not roused from his rapturous apathy even by the conduct of probably the most remarkable maitre d’hotel in the world.