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“I’d like to, but I can’t,” said Carroll. “The fact is, I paid in advance for these rooms, and if I lived anywhere else I’d be losing five guineas a week on them.”

Miss Cavendish regarded him severely. She had never quite mastered his American humor.

“But–five guineas–why, that’s nothing to you,” she said. Something in the lodger’s face made her pause. “You don’t mean–“

“Yes, I do,” said the lodger, smiling. “You see, I started in to lay siege to London without sufficient ammunition. London is a large town, and it didn’t fall as quickly as I thought it would. So I am economizing. Mr. Lockhart’s Coffee Rooms and I are no longer strangers.”

Miss Cavendish put down her cup of tea untasted and leaned toward him.

“Are you in earnest?” she asked. “For how long?”

“Oh, for the last month,” replied the lodger; “they are not at all bad–clean and wholesome and all that.”

“But the suppers you gave us, and this,” she cried, suddenly, waving her hands over the pretty tea-things, “and the cake and muffins?”

“My friends, at least,” said Carroll, “need not go to Lockhart’s.”

“And the Savoy?” asked Miss Cavendish, mournfully shaking her head. “A dream of the past,” said Carroll, waving his pipe through the smoke. “Gatti’s? Yes, on special occasions; but for necessity the Chancellor’s, where one gets a piece of the prime roast beef of Old England, from Chicago, and potatoes for ninepence–a pot of bitter twopence-halfpenny, and a penny for the waiter. It’s most amusing on the whole. I am learning a little about London, and some things about myself. They are both most interesting subjects.”

“Well, I don’t like it,” Miss Cavendish declared, helplessly. “When I think of those suppers and the flowers, I feel–I feel like a robber.”

“Don’t,” begged Carroll. “I am really the most happy of men–that is, as the chap says in the play, I would be if I wasn’t so damned miserable. But I owe no man a penny and I have assets–I have L80 to last me through the winter and two marvellous plays; and I love, next to yourself, the most wonderful woman God ever made. That’s enough.”

“But I thought you made such a lot of money by writing?” asked Miss Cavendish.

“I do–that is, I could,” answered Carroll, “if I wrote the things that sell; but I keep on writing plays that won’t.”

“And such plays!” exclaimed Marion, warmly; “and to think that they are going begging!” She continued, indignantly, “I can’t imagine what the managers do want.”

“I know what they don’t want,” said the American. Miss Cavendish drummed impatiently on the tea-tray.

“I wish you wouldn’t be so abject about it,” she said. “If I were a man I’d make them take those plays.”

“How?” asked the American; “with a gun?”

“Well, I’d keep at it until they read them,” declared Marion. “I’d sit on their front steps all night and I’d follow them in cabs, and I’d lie in wait for them at the stage-door. I’d just make them take them.”

Carroll sighed and stared at the ceiling. “I guess I’ll give up and go home,” he said.

“Oh, yes, do, run away before you are beaten,” said Miss Cavendish, scornfully. “Why, you can’t go now. Everybody will be back in town soon, and there are a lot of new plays coming on, and some of them are sure to be failures, and that’s our chance. You rush in with your piece, and somebody may take it sooner than close the theatre.”

“I’m thinking of closing the theatre myself,” said Carroll. “What’s the use of my hanging on here?” he exclaimed. “It distresses Helen to know I am in London, feeling about her as I do–and the Lord only knows how it distresses me. And, maybe, if I went away,” he said, consciously, “she might miss me. She might see the difference.”

Miss Cavendish held herself erect and pressed her lips together with a severe smile. “If Helen Cabot doesn’t see the difference between you and the other men she knows now,” she said, “I doubt if she ever will. Besides–” she continued, and then hesitated.