Held to Answer: A Novel

"Follow your star, John," Bessie declared stoutly. FRONTISPIECE. See page [82].

HELD
TO ANSWER

A NOVEL

BY

PETER CLARK MACFARLANE

AUTHOR OF
THOSE WHO HAVE COME BACK, ETC.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
W. B. KING

NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1916,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.

All rights reserved

Published, February, 1916
Reprinted, February, 1916 (four times)

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I [The Face That Did not Fit]
II [One Man and Another]
III [When the Dark Went Away]
IV [Advent and Adventure]
V [The Rate Clerk]
VI [On Two Fronts]
VII [The High Bid]
VIII [John Makes Up]
IX [A Demonstration from the Gallery]
X [A Stage Kiss]
XI [Seed to the Wind]
XII [A Thing Incalculable]
XIII [The Scene Played Out]
XIV [The Method of a Dream]
XV [The Catastrophe]
XVI [The King Still Lives]
XVII [When Dreams Come True]
XVIII [The House Divided]
XIX [His Next Adventure]
XX [A Woman with a Want]
XXI [A Cry of Distress]
XXII [Pursuit Begins]
XXIII [Capricious Woman]
XXIV [The Day of All Days]
XXV [His Bright Idea]
XXVI [Unexpectedly Easy]
XXVII [The First Alarm]
XXVIII [The Arrest]
XXIX [The Angel Advises]
XXX [The Scene in the Vault]
XXXI [A Misadventure]
XXXII [The Coward and His Conscience]
XXXIII [The Battle of the Headlines]
XXXIV [A Way That Women Have]
XXXV [On Preliminary Examination]
XXXVI [A Promise of Strength]
XXXVII [The Terms of Surrender]
XXXVIII [Sunday in All People's]
XXXIX [The Cup Too Full]
XL [The Elder in the Chair]

HELD TO ANSWER

CHAPTER I

THE FACE THAT DID NOT FIT

Two well-dressed men waited outside the rail on what was facetiously denominated the mourners' bench. One was a packer of olives, the other the owner of oil wells. A third, an orange shipper, leaned against the rail, pulling at his red moustaches and yearning wistfully across at a wattle-throated person behind the roll-top desk who was talking impatiently on the telephone. Just as the receiver was hung up with an audible click, a buzzer on the wall croaked harshly,—one long and two short croaks.

Instantly there was a scuffling of feet upon the linoleum over in a corner, where mail was being opened by a huge young fellow with the profile of a mountain and a gale of tawny hair blown up from his brow. Undoubling suddenly, this rangy figure of a man shot upward with Jack-in-the-box abruptness and a violence which threatened the stability of both the desk before him and the absurdly small typewriter stand upon his left. Seizing a select portion of the correspondence, he lunged past the roll-top desk of Heitmuller, the chief clerk, and aimed toward the double doors of grained oak which loomed behind. But his progress was grotesque, for he careened like a camel when he walked. In the first stride or two these careenings only threatened to be dangerous, but in the third or fourth they made good their promise. One lurching hip joint banged the drawn-out leaf of the chief clerk's desk, sweeping a shower of papers to the floor.

"John—dammit!" snapped Heitmuller irritably. The other hip caracoled against the unopened half of the double doors as John yawed through. The door complained loudly, rattling upon its hinges and in its brazen sockets, so that for a moment there was clatter and disturbance from one end of the office to the other.

The orange shipper started nervously, and the chief clerk, cocking his head gander-wise, gazed in disgust at the confusion on the floor, while far within Robert Mitchell, the General Freight Agent of the California Consolidated Railway, lifted a massive face from his desk with a look of mild reproof in his small blue eyes.

Yet when the huge stenographer came back, and with another scuffling of clumsy feet stooped to retrieve the litter about Heitmuller's revolving chair, he seemed so regretful and his features lighted with such a helplessly apologetic smile that even his awkwardness appeared commendable, since it was so obviously seasoned with the grace of perfectly good intent.

Appreciation of this was advertised in the forgiving chuckle of the chief clerk who, standing now at the rail, remarked sotto voce to the orange shipper: "John is as good as a vaudeville act!"

At this the red moustaches undulated appreciatively, while the two "mourners" laughed so audibly that the awkward man, once more in his chair, darted an embarrassed glance at them, and the red flush came again to his face. He suspected they were laughing at him, and as if to comfort himself, a finger and thumb went into his right vest pocket and drew out a clipping from the advertising columns of the morning paper. Holding it deep in his hand, he read furtively:

ACTING TAUGHT. Charles Kenton, character actor, temporarily disengaged, will receive a few select pupils in dramatic expression at his studio in The Albemarle. Terms reasonable.

Then John looked across aggressively at the men who had laughed. They were not laughing now, but nodding in his direction, and whispering busily.

What were they saying? That he was a joke, a failure? That he had been in this chair seven years? That he was a big, snubbed, defeated, over-worked handy-man about this big, loosely organized office? That in seven years he had neither been able to get himself promoted nor discharged? No doubt!

As if to get away from the thought, John turned from his typewriter to the open window and looked out. There was the spire of the grand old First Church down there below him. Yonder were the sky-notching business blocks of the pushing city of Los Angeles, as it was in the early nineteen hundreds. There, too, were the villa-crowned heights to the north, shut in at last by the barren ridges of the Sierra Madre Mountains, some of which, in this month of January, were snow-capped.

But here were these foolish men still nodding and whispering. Good fellows, too, but blind. What did they know about him really?

They knew that he was a stenographer, but they did not know that he was a stenographer to the glory of God!—one who cleaned his typewriter, dusted his desk, opened the mail, wrote his letters, ate, walked, slept, all to the honor of his creator—that the whole of life to him was a sort of sacrament.

They thought he was beaten and discouraged, an industrial slave, drawn helplessly into the cogs. They, poor, purblind materialists, were without vision. They did not know that there were finer things than pickles and crude oil. They did not know that he was to soar; that already his wings were budding, nor that he lived in an inner state of spiritual exaltation as delicious as it was unsuspected. They pitied him; they laughed commiseratingly. He did not want their commiseration; he spurned their laughter and their pity. He was full of youth and the exuberance of hope. He was full of an expanding strength that made him stronger as his dream grew brighter. Only his eyes were tired. The cross lights were bad. For a moment he shaded his brow tenderly with his hand, reflecting that he must hereafter use an eye-shade by day as methodically he used one in his nightly study.

The morning moved along. The yearning orange shipper went away. One mourner rose and passed inside. The other waited impatiently for his turn to do the same. Luncheon time came for John, and he ate it in the file room—ravenously; and while he ate he read—the Congressional Record; and reading, made notations on the margin, for John was preparing for what he was preparing, although he did not quite know what. The train of destiny was rumbling along, and when it stopped at his station, he proposed to swing on board.

His luncheon down swiftly, as much through hunger as through haste, he swung out of the door, bound for Charles Kenton, "actor—temporarily disengaged—Hotel Albemarle—terms reasonable," moving with such headlong speed that he was soon within that self-important presence.

"Hampstead is my name," he blurted, with clumsy directness, "John Hampstead," and the interview with Destiny was on.

"The first trouble with you," declared the white-haired actor critically, "is that your face doesn't fit."

John wet a lip and hitched a nervous leg, but sat awkwardly silent, his eyes boring hungrily, as if waiting for more. The actor, however, was slow to add more. Faces were his enthusiasm, as well as the raw material of his profession, but this face puzzled him, so that before committing himself further he paused to survey it again: the strong nose with its hump of energy, the well buttressed chin, and then the broad forehead with its unusually thick, bony ridge encircling the base of the brows like a bilge keel, proclaiming loudly that here was a man with racial dynamite in his system, one who, whatever else he might become, was now and always a first-class animal.

The eyebrows heightened this suggestion by being thick and yellow, and sweeping off to the temples in a scroll-like flare. The forehead itself was broad, but gathered a high look from that welter of tawny hair which was roached straight up and back, giving the effect of one who plunges headlong.

But the eyes completely modified the countenance. They did not plunge. They halted and beamed softly. Gray and deep-seated, they made all that face's force the force of tenderness, by burning with a light that was obviously inner and spiritual. The mouth, again, while as cleanly chiseled as if cut from marble,—sensitive, impressionistic, fine, was, alas! weak; or if not weak, advertising weakness by an habitual expression of lax amiability; although along with this the actor noted that the two lips, buttoning so loosely at the corners, could none the less collaborate in a most engaging smile.

Kenton concluded his second appraisal with a little gesture of impatience. The man's features gave each other the lie direct, and that was all there was to it. They said: This man is a beast, a great, roaring lion of a man; and then they said: No, this lion is a lamb, a mild, dreamy, sucking dove sort of person.

"That's it," he iterated. "Your face doesn't fit."

Hampstead did not wince.

"The question is," he proposed, in a voice husky with a mixture of embarrassment and determination, "how am I to make it fit? Or, failing that, how am I to get somewhere with a face that doesn't fit?"

The actor's reply was half sagacity, half "selling talk", mixed with some judicious flattery and tinged with inevitable gallery play, although there was no gallery.

"Elocution?" Kenton observed, with a little grimace of derision. "No! Oratory? Not at all!" The weight of his withering scorn was tremendous. "There are no such things. It is all acting! A man speaks with the whole of himself—his eyes, his mouth, his body, his walk, his pose—everything. That's what you need to learn. Self-expression! I can make your face fit. That's simple enough," and Kenton waved his hand as if the re-stamping of a man's features was the easiest thing he did. "I can make your body graceful. I can take that voice of yours and make it strong as the roar of a bull, and as soft as rich, brown velvet. Yes," and the actor leaped to his feet in growing enthusiasm, "I can make 'em all respond to every whim of what's passing inside. But," he asked suddenly, with a penetrating glance, "will that make an orator of you? Well, that depends on what's passing inside. It takes a great soul to make an orator—great imagination, mind, feelings, sentiments. Have you got 'em? I doubt it! I doubt it!"

The old man confirmed his dubiousness with the uncomplimentary emphasis of hesitating silence. In the sincerity of his critical analysis, he had forgotten that he was trying to secure a pupil. "And yet—and yet—" his eye began to kindle as he looked, "I tell you I don't know, boy—there's something—there might be something behind that face of yours. It might come out, you know, it might come out!"

Kenton drawled the last words out slowly in a deeply speculative tone, and then asked abruptly: "How old are you?"

"Twenty-four," admitted John, feeling suddenly as if he confessed the years of Methuselah.

But the dark eyes of the old actor sparkled, and his long, mobile lips parted in the ghost of a sigh which crept out through teeth stained yellow by years and tobacco, after which he ejaculated admiringly: "My God, but you are young!"

This came as an inspiring thought to John. He did feel young, all but his eyes. What was the matter with them that the lids were so woodeny of late? Yes; he was young, despite seven submerged years, and the wings of his soul were preening.

Back in the General Freight Office, John fell upon his work with happy vigor. Spat, spat, spat, and a letter was on its way from Dear Sir to Yours truly. But in the midst of these spattings, he paused to muse.

"Kenton said he could make me graceful," the big fellow was communing over his typewriter, when abruptly the outer door opened and, after a single glance, John appeared to forget both his communings and his work. Swinging about, he sat transfixed, his odd features turned eccentrically handsome by a light of adoration which began to glow upon them, as if an astral presence had entered.

Yet to the unprejudiced observer the newcomer was no heavenly being, but a mere schoolgirl, whose dress had not been long at the shoe-top stage. With a swish of skirts and an excited ripple of laughter, she had burst in like a breeze of youth itself. But to this breeziness of youth the young lady added the indefinable thing called charm, and the promise of greater charm to come. She was already tall and would be taller, fair to look upon and certain to be fairer. To a dress of some warm red color, a touch of piquancy was added by a Tam-o'-Shanter cap of plaid that was itself pushed jauntily to one side by a wealth of crinkly brown hair; while a bit of soft brown fur encircled the neck and cuddled affectionately as a kitten under the smooth, plump chin. The face was oval with a tendency to fullness, and the nose, while by no means retroussé, was as distinctively Irish as the sparkle in the blue of her laughing eyes. Irish, too, were the smiling lips, but the delicious dimples that flecked the white and red of her cheeks were entirely without nationality. They were just woman, budding, ravishing woman; and there is no doubt whatever that they helped to make the fascination of that merry face complete, when its spell was cast over the soul of Hampstead.

"Oh, John!" exclaimed the young lady with impulsive familiarity, bounding through the gate and over to his side, "I want you to write some invitations for me. This is my week to entertain the Phrosos. See! Isn't the paper dear?"

There were caresses in the big man's eyes as the girl drew near, but he replied with less freedom than her own form of address invited: "Good afternoon, Miss Bessie."

The restraint in his speech however was much in contrast to the bold poaching of his eyes. But Bessie appeared to notice neither restraint nor the boldness as, standing by his desk, with the big man looking on interestedly, she undid the package in her hand.

The picture of frank and simple comradeship so immediately established proclaimed a certain mutual unawareness between this pretty, half-developed girl and this big, unawakened man that was as delightful to contemplate as it evidently was to enjoy.

"Isn't it darling?" the girl demanded again, having exposed to view the contents of her box, invitation paper with envelopes to match, in color as pink as her own cheeks.

"Yes, Miss Bessie, it is dear," John concurred placidly.

"But you are not looking at it," protested the girl.

"No," the awkward man confessed, but entirely unabashed, "I am looking at you—devouringly."

"Well, you needn't," Bessie answered spicily.

"Yes, I need," John declared coolly. "You do not know how much I need. You are the only unspoiled human being I ever see in this office."

"Old Heit does look rather shopworn," Bessie whispered roguishly. "But, look here," and she thrust out her lips in a pout that was at once defiant and tantalizing, while her eyes rested for a moment upon the closed double doors: "My father is an unspoiled human being."

"What have you been doing to your hair?" Hampstead demanded critically, refusing to be diverted.

"Doing it up, of course, as grown women should," she vouchsafed with emphasis. "Don't you like it?"

With a flash of her two hands, one of which snatched out a pin while the other swept off the plaid cap, she spun herself rapidly about so that John might view the new coiffure from all angles.

"Oh, of course, I have to like it," he said, with mock mournfulness. "I have to like anything you do, because I like you, and because you are my boss's boss; but I am sorry to lose the thick braids down your back, with that delicious little velvety tuft at the end that I used to catch up and tickle your ear with in the long, long ago."

"But how long ago was that, Sir Critical?" challenged Bessie.

"Long, long ago," affirmed Hampstead, with another of his humorous sighs, "when it was a part of my duty to take you to the circus and buy you peanuts and lemonade of a color to match your cheeks."

"And that," dissented the young lady triumphantly, "was only last September, and the one before that, and, in fact, almost every circus day since I can remember."

"But now that you are doing your hair up high, you will not need me to take you to the circus again."

This time the note of sadness in Hampstead's voice was genuine, whereat all the loyalty in the soul of Bessie leaped up.

"You shall," she declared, with an impulsive sweetness of manner, while she leaned close and added in a whisper that made the assurance deliciously confidential—"as long as you wish."

"Then I shall do it forever," declared John recklessly.

"However," and Miss Elizabeth Mitchell, with a playful acquisition of dignity, switched the subject abruptly by announcing briskly, "business before circuses."

"Phrosos before rhinos, as it were," consented John.

"Yes—now take your pencil and let me dictate."

"But," bantered John, "I allow no woman to dictate to me. Besides, I write a perfectly horrible hand."

"Oh," explained Bessie, "but I want them on the typewriter. It'll make the other girls wild. None of them can command a typewriter."

"Yet," protested Hampstead, "overlooking for the moment the offensiveness in that word 'command', I venture to suggest, Miss Mitchell, that things are not done that way this year. A typewritten invitation isn't considered good form in the best circles."

"I don't care; we'll have 'em," declared Bessie. "We'll set a new fashion." Her little foot smote the floor sharply, and she stood bolt upright, so upright that she leaned back, gazing at John through austere lashes, her face lengthening till the dimples disappeared, while the Cupid's bow of her lips became almost a memory.

"Oh, very well," weakened Hampstead, bowing his head, "I cannot brook that gaze for long. It shall be as your Grace commands."

"Tired, aren't you?" commented Bessie, suddenly mollified, and scanning the big face narrowly, while a look of soberness came into her eyes. "I can see it; and your eyes look bad—very bad, John." Her voice was girlishly sympathetic. "These people do not appreciate you, either. But I do! I know!" and she nodded her round chin stoutly, while she laid a hand upon the arm of this man who, seven years her senior, was in some respects her junior. "You are a very great man in the day of his obscurity. It will come out some time. You will be General Manager of the railroad, or something very, very big. Won't you?" and she leaned close again with that delightfully confidential whisper.

"I admit it," confessed John, with a happy chuckle.

But Bessie's restless eye had fallen upon the clock. "Pickles and artichokes!" she exclaimed, with a sudden change of mood, "I must flit."

Snatching from her bag a crumpled note, she tossed it on the desk, calling back: "Here. This is what I want to say to 'em."

Hampstead sat for a moment looking after her, his lips parted, his great hands set upon his knees with fingers sprawled very widely, until Bessie was out of view behind the double doors that admitted to her father's presence.

CHAPTER II

ONE MAN AND ANOTHER

In the dusk of the early winter's night in that land where winter hints its presence but slightly in any other way, two children dashed out of a rambling shell of a cottage that sprawled rather hopelessly over an unkempt lot, screaming: "Uncle John! Uncle John!"

Roused from castled, starry dreams, the big stenographer, who had been enjoying the feel of the dark upon his eyes, and the occasional happy fragrance of orange blossoms in his nostrils, greeted each with a bear hug, and the three clattered together up the rickety steps into a tiny hall. On the left was an oblong room, and beyond it, through curtains, appeared a table set for dinner. Light streaming in from this second room revealed the first as a sort of parlor-studio, where a piano, a lounge, easels, malsticks, palettes, and stacks of unframed canvases jostled each other indifferently. An inspection would have shown that these pictures were mostly landscapes, with now and then a flower study in brilliant colors; and to the practised eye a distressing atmosphere of failure would have obtruded from every one.

From somewhere beyond the dining room came the odor of cooking food, and the sound of energetic but heavy footsteps.

"Hello, Rose," called John cheerily.

At the moment a woman came into view, bearing a steaming platter. She was large of frame, with gray eyes, with straight light hair, fair wide brow, and features that showed a general resemblance to Hampstead's own. Her face had a weary, disturbed look, but lighted for a moment at the sight of her brother.

Depositing the platter upon the table, the woman sank heavily into a chair at the end, where she began immediately to serve the plates. The children, a girl and a boy, sat side by side, with John across from them. This left a vacant chair opposite Rose, and before this a plate was laid.

For a time the family fell upon its food in silence. The girl was eleven years old perhaps, with eyes of lustrous hazel, reddish-brown hair massed in curls upon her shoulders and hanging below, cheeks hopelessly freckled, mouth large, and nose also without hope through being waggishly pugged. The boy, whose sharp, pale features exhibited traces of a battle with ill health begun at birth and not yet ended, had eyes that were like his mother's, clear and gray, and there was a brave turn to his upper lip that excited pity on a face so pale. He looked older but was probably younger than his sister. Hero-worship, frank and unbounded, was in the glance with which the two from time to time beamed upon their uncle.

After a considerable interval, John, glancing first at the empty chair and then at his sister, asked with significant constraint in his tone: "Any word?"

His sister's head was shaken disconsolately, and the angular shoulders seemed to sink a little more wearily as her face was again bowed toward her plate.

After another interval, Hampstead remarked: "You seem worried to-night, Rose."

"The rent is due to-morrow," she replied in a wooden voice.

"Is that all?" exclaimed John, throwing back his head with a relieved laugh. At the same time a hand had stolen into his pocket, and he drew out a twenty-dollar gold piece and tossed it across the table.

"The rent is $17.50," observed Rose, eyeing the coin doubtfully.

"Keep the change," chuckled John, "and pass the potatoes."

But the woman's gloom appeared to deepen.

"You pay your board promptly," she protested. "This is the third month in succession that you have also paid the rent. Besides, you are always doing for the children."

"Who wouldn't, I'd like to know?" challenged John, surveying them both proudly; whereat Dick, his mouth being otherwise engaged, darted a look of gratitude from his great, wise eyes, while Tayna reached over and patted her uncle's hand affectionately. "Tayna" was an Indian name the girl's father had picked up somewhere.

"Besides," went on John, "Charles is having an uphill fight of it right now. It's a pleasure to stand by a gallant fellow like him. He goes charging after his ideal like old Sir Galahad."

But the face of his sister refused to kindle.

"Like Don Quixote, you mean," she answered cynically. "I haven't heard from him in three weeks. He has not sent me any money in six. He sends it less and less frequently. He becomes more and more irresponsible. You are spoiling him to support his family for him, and," she added, with a choke in her voice, while a tear appeared in her eye, "he is spoiling us—killing our love for him."

The boy slipped down from his chair and stood beside his mother, stroking her arm sympathetically.

"Poppie's all right," he whispered in his peculiar drawl. "He'll come home soon and bring a lot of money with him. See if he don't!"

"Oh, I know," confessed Rose, while with one hand she dabbed the corner of her eye with an apron, and with the other clasped the boy impulsively to her. "I know I should not give way before the children. But—but it grows worse and worse, John!"

"Nonsense!" rebuked her brother. "You're only tired and run down. You need a rest, by Hokey! that's what you need. Charles is liable to sell that Grand Canyon canvas of his any time, and when he does, you'll get a month in Catalina, that's what you will!"

The wife was silently busy with her apron and her eyes.

"Do you know, Rose," John continued with forced enthusiasm, "my admiration for Charles grows all the time. He follows his star, that boy does!"

"And forgets his family—leaves it to starve!" reproached the sister bitterly, while the sag of her cheeks became still more noticeable.

"Ah, but that's where you do Charles an injustice," insisted John. "He knows I'm here. We have a sort of secret understanding; that is," and he gulped a little at going too far—"that is, we understand each other. He knows that while he is following his ideal, I won't see you starve. He's a genius; I'm the dub. It's a fair partnership. His eye is always on the goal. He will get there sure—and soon, now, too."

"He will never get there!" blurted out the dejected woman, as if with a sudden disregardful loosing of her real convictions. "For thirteen years I have hoped and toiled and believed and waited. A good while ago I made up my mind. He has not the vital spark. For five years I have pleaded with him to give it up—to surrender his ambition, to turn his undoubted talent to account. He has had the rarest aptitude for decorating. We might be having an income of ten thousand a year now. Instead he pursues this will-o'-the-wisp ambition of his. He is crazy about color, always chasing a foolish sunset or some wonderful desert panorama of sky and cloud and mountain—seeing colors no one else can see but unable to put his vision upon the canvas. That's the truth, John! I have never spoken it before. Never hinted it before the children! Charles Langham is a failure. He will never be anything else but a failure!"

The words, concluded by the barely successful suppression of a sob, fell on unprotesting silence. Who but this life-worn woman had so good an opportunity to know if they were true, so good a right to speak them if she believed them true? John looked at his plate, Tayna and Dick looked at each other. It required a stout heart to break the oppressive quiet, and for the moment no one in this group had that heart. The break came from the outside, when some one ran swiftly up the steps and threw open the front door. Instant sounds of collision and confusion issued from the hall, followed immediately by a masculine voice, thin and injured in tone, calling excitedly:

"Well, for the love of Michael Angelo! What do you keep stuffing the hall so full of furniture for? Won't somebody please come and help me with these things?"

The dinner table was abruptly deserted; but quick as John and the children were, Rose was ahead of them, and when they reached the hallway, a thin man of medium height, with an aquiline nose, dark eyes, and long loose hair, was helplessly in the embrace of the laughing and crying woman.

"Oh, Charles, you did come home; you did come home, didn't you?" she was crying.

Charles broke in volubly. "Well, I should say I did. What did you expect? Have I ever impressed you as a man who would neglect his family?" After which, with the look of one who has put his accusers in the wrong, he rescued himself from his wife's emphatic embraces, held her off for a moment with a look of real fondness, and then brushed her with his lips, first on one cheek and then upon the other.

"Dad-dee!" clamored the children in chorus. "Daddee!" Yet it was noticeable that they did not presume to rush upon their father, but flung their voices before them, experimentally, as it were.

"Well, well, las ninas" (las ninas being the Spanish for children), the father exclaimed, his piercing dark eyes upon them with delight and displeasure mingling. "Aren't you going to give me a hug? Your mother nearly strangles me, and you stand off eyeing me as if I were a new species."

At the open arms of invitation, both of the children plunged unhesitatingly; but their reception was brief.

"Run away now, father is tired," the nervous-looking man proclaimed presently, straightening his shoulders, while he sniffed the atmosphere. "Dinner, eh? Gods and goats, but I am hungry!"

Rose led the little procession proudly back to the table, drawing out her husband's chair for him, hovering over him, smoothing his hair, unfolding his napkin, and stooping to place a fresh kiss upon his fine, high, but narrow brow.

"That will do now; that will do now," he chided, with an air of having indulged a foolishly doting woman long enough. "For goodness' sake, Rose, give me something to eat."

His wife, still upon her feet, carried him the platter from which the family had been served. Charles condemned it with a glance.

"Isn't there something fresh you could give me? Something that hasn't been—pawed over?"

His tone was eloquent of sensibilities outraged, and his dark eyes, having first flashed a reproach upon his wife, swept the circle with a look of expected comprehension in them, as if he knew that all would understand the delicacies of the artistic temperament.

"Why, yes," admitted Rose, without a sign of resentment. "I can get you something fresh if you will wait a few minutes."

She slipped out to the kitchen from which presently the odor of broiling meat proceeded, while the artist coolly rolled his cigarette, and, surveying without touching the cup of coffee which John had poured for him, raised his voice to call: "Some fresh coffee, too, Rose, please!"

After this Langham leveled his eye on his brother-in-law and asked airily, "Well, John, how's everything with you?"

"Fine as silk, Charles," replied Hampstead. "How is it with you?"

"Never better," declared Langham. "Never saw such sunsets in your life as they are having up the Monterey coast. I tell you there never were such colors. There was one there in December,"—and he launched into a detailed description of it, his eyes, his face, his hands, his whole body laboring to convey the picture which his animated spirits proclaimed was still upon the screen of his mind.

As the description was concluded, Rose placed a platter before him, upon which, garnished with parsley, two small chops appeared, delicately grilled.

Abruptly ceasing conversation, Charles sank a knife and fork into one of them and transferred a generous morsel to his mouth.

"Thanks, old girl; just up to your topmost mark," he confessed ungrudgingly, after a few moments, during which, with half-closed eyes, he had been chewing vigorously and with a singleness of purpose rather rare in him.

"Sold any pictures lately?" asked John casually.

"No," said Langham abruptly, lowering his voice, while a look of annoyance shaded his brow. "I dropped in at the gallery first thing, but"—and he shrugged his shoulders—"Nothing doing! However," and he became immediately cheerful again, "Mrs. Lawson has been looking awfully hard at that Grand Canyon canvas. If she buys that, my fortune's made."

"And if she doesn't," observed Rose pessimistically.

"And if she doesn't?" her husband exclaimed with sudden irritation. "Well—it'll be made just the same. You see if it isn't! Oh, say!" and a light broke upon his face so merry that it immediately dissipated every sign of annoyance. "What do you think? I saw Owens to-day, the fellow who auctions alleged oil paintings at a minimum of two dollars each. You know the scheme—pictures painted while you wait—roses, chrysanthemums, landscapes even. Well, he offered me fifteen dollars a day to paint pictures for him. Think of it! To sit in the window before a gaping crowd painting those miserable daubs, a dozen or two a day, while he auctions them off. His impudence! If I had been as big as you are, Jack, I would have punched him."

"Fifteen dollars a day," commented Rose thoughtfully.

"Yes," laughed Langham, his little black eyes a-twinkle, as he clipped the last morsel from the first of his chops. "The idea!"

"Well, I hope you took it," his wife suggested.

"Rose!" exclaimed Langham, rising bolt upright at the table and looking into her face as if she had unwarrantably and unexpectedly hurled the blackest insult. "Rose! An artist like me!"

"It is the kind of a job for an artist like you," she rejoined stingingly, with a sarcastic emphasis on just the right words.

"Oh, my God! My God!" exclaimed the man sharply, turning from the table, while he threw his hands dramatically upward and clutched at the back of his head, after which he took a turn up and down the room as if beside himself with unutterable emotions.

John judged that this was the fitting moment for his withdrawal, but Langham's distress of mind was not too great for him to observe the movement and to follow. He overtook his brother-in-law in the studio-parlor, and his manner was coolly importunate.

"Say, old man!" he whispered, "could you let me have five? I'm a little short on carfare, and you'll be gone in the morning before I get up."

"Sure," exclaimed John, without a moment's hesitation, delving in the depths of the pocket from which he had produced the money for the rent, and handing out a five-dollar piece.

"Thanks, old chap," said Langham, seizing it eagerly and hastening away, after an affectionate slap on the shoulder of his bigger and as he thought baser metaled brother-in-law. He did not, however, say that he would repay the loan, and Hampstead did not remark that it was the last gold coin in his pocket and that he should have no more till pay day, ten days hence.

John let his admiration for the assurance of Langham play for a moment, and then turned to the rear of the studio, opened a door, struck a match, and groped his way to a naked gas jet. The sudden flare of light revealed a lean-to room, meant originally for nobody knew what, but turned into a bedroom. The only article of furniture which piqued curiosity in the least was a table against the wall, across which a long plank had been balanced. Upon it and equilibrated as carefully as the plank itself, was a row of books of many shapes and sizes and in various stages of preservation. This plank was John's library.

Stuck about upon the walls were several large photogravures, portraying various stirring scenes in history, mostly Roman. They were unframed and fastened crudely to the wall with pins. Evidently this was the living place of an untidy man.

The tiny table, with its balanced over-load of books, was directly beneath the gas. John dropped heavily into the wooden chair before it and drew to him a number of sheets of paper, upon which, with much labor and many erasings, he began to fashion a sort of motto or legend. Satisfied at length with his work, he printed the finished legend swiftly in rude capital letters in the center of a fresh sheet, snatched down the picture of a Christian martyr which occupied the central space above his library, and with the same four pins affixed his motto in that particular spot, where it would greet him instantly upon opening the door, and where it would be the last thing upon which his eyes fell as he went to sleep and the first when he awakened in the morning.

Once it was in position, he stood off and admired it, reading aloud:

"ETERNAL HAMMERING IS THE PRICE OF SUCCESS!"

"That's the stuff," he croaked enthusiastically.

"Eternal hammering!" And then he paused a moment, after which his reverie was continued aloud. "That actor was telling me to-day about technique. He said: 'There's a right way to do everything—to pitch a horseshoe even.' He's right. The fellow with the best technique will knock the highest persimmon. What makes me such a good stenographer? Technique. What makes me such a bum office flunkey? The lack of technique—no voice—no form—no self-confidence. I am a young-man-afraid-of-himself—that's who I am. Technique first and then—gravitation! That's the idea!"

By gravitation, however, Hampstead did not mean that law which keeps the heavenly bodies from getting on the wrong side of the street, but that process, which in his short life he had already observed, by means of which the man in the crowd who takes advantage of his opportunities and, by the dig of an elbow here, the insert of a shoulder there, and the stiff thrust of a foot and leg yonder, sooner or later arrives opposite the gateway of his particular desires.

Mere opportunism? That and a little more; a sort of conviction that fortune herself is something of an opportunist, that what a man wants to do, fortune, sooner or later, will help him to do, if he only wills himself in the direction of the want early enough and long enough to give the fickle jade her chance.

By way of proceeding immediately to hammer, Hampstead reached for a heavy calf-bound volume, bearing the imprint of the Los Angeles Public Library, and settled himself to read.

Most people in the railroad office were tired when they finished their day's work. They were done with effort. John, however, was just ready to begin. They thought of recreation; John thought only of hammering.

Since his scholastic education had been broken off in the middle by economic necessities, he had formed the plan of reading at night the entire written history of the world, from the first cuneiform inscription down to the last edition of the last newspaper. In pursuance of this plan, he had already traveled far down the centuries, and it was with eagerness that he adjusted his eye-shade to-night, because when he lifted the cover of his book he knew that he would swing open the doors on one of the greatest centuries in human history, the century in which the world discovered the individual. Hampstead was himself an individual. This was in some sense the story of his own discovery.

When John had been reading for perhaps half an hour, there came a bird-like tap at his door, accompanied by a suppressed giggle.

"Who comes there?" called the student in sepulchral tones, stabbing the page at a particular spot with his thumb, while his eyes were lifted.

The only audible sound was another giggle, but the door swung open mysteriously, revealing two small, white-robed figures silhouetted against the shadows in the studio.

"Enter, ghosts!" John commanded, in the same sepulchral voice, while his eyes fell again upon his pages. The ghosts chortled and advanced, but with great circumspection, to the little table with its dangerously balanced bookshelf, its miscellaneous litter of papers, and its silent, absorbed student.

Tayna, her long burnished curls cascading over the white of her nightgown, and her eyes shining softly, ducked her head and arose under one arm of her uncle, where presently she felt herself drawn close with an affectionate, satisfying sort of squeeze. The boy, approaching from the other side, laid an arm upon the shoulder of the man, and stood watching with fascination the eyes of his uncle in their steady sweep from side to side of the printed page.

"Uncle John," asked Tayna shyly, burying her face in his neck as she put the question, "when will you be President?"

"When shall you be President?" corrected the boy, looking across at his sister with that same old-mannish expression which was a part of all he said and did.

Hampstead cuddled the girl closer, and his eye abandoned the page to look down the bridge of his nose into distance.

"Why?" he asked presently.

"Oh, because," said Tayna, with a little shiver of eagerness, "I can hardly wait."

Hampstead's eyes wandered to his motto on the wall. The eyes of the boy followed and spelled out the letters wonderingly, but in silence.

"We must be able to wait," said John, squeezing Tayna again. "It's a long, long way; but if we just keep on keeping on, why, after a while we are there, you know."

Tayna sighed and reached up a round, plump arm till it encircled Hampstead's neck, as she asked, still more shyly:

"And when you are President, every one will know just how good and great you are, and they won't call you awkward nor—nor homely any more, will they?"

A flush and a chuckle marked John's reception of this query, after which he observed hastily and a bit apprehensively:

"Say, you wet little goldfishes! Remember that you are never, never, now or any time, howsoever odd I bear myself, to breathe a word to anybody, not to a single soul, not to your mamma or your papa or your Sunday-school teacher or anybody, of all these nice little play secrets which we have between ourselves."

An instant seriousness came over the children's faces.

"Cross my heart," murmured Tayna, with a twitch of her slender finger across her breast.

"And hope to die," added Dick, with a funeral solemnity, as he completed Tayna's cross by a vertical movement of a stubby thumb in the direction of his own wishbone of a breast.

Hampstead looked relieved.

"But," affirmed Tayna stoutly, "they are not play secrets. They are real secrets. Aren't they?"

John looked up at his motto again.

"Yes," he said in a low, determined voice. "They are real secrets."

"And," half-declared, half-questioned Dick, "if you aren't President, you are going to be some other kind of a very great man?

"Aren't you?" the boy persisted, when Hampstead was silent.

"Tell you to-morrow," laughed John. "Good night, ghosts!" and with a swift assault of his lips upon the cheeks of either, he gently impelled them toward the door.

"Good night, your Excellency!" giggled Tayna.

"Good night, my counselors," responded Hampstead, reaching for his book.

An hour later Hampstead was still reading. Another hour later he was still reading. But something like a quarter of an hour beyond that, when it might have been, say, near half-past eleven, he was not reading. He was turning his head strangely from side to side and digging a knuckle into his eyes. A surprising thing had happened. He could no longer see the lines upon the page—nor the page itself—nor the book—nor anything!

His first impression was that the gas had gone out; but this swiftly gave way to the conviction that he had gone blind—stone blind!—and so suddenly that it happened right between the beheading of one of the queens of Henry the Eighth and the marrying of another. He was now tardily conscious that for some time his eyes had been giving him pain, that he had rubbed them periodically to clear away white opacities that appeared upon the page; but now there was no pain; they were suffused with moisture, and the room was dark.

After an interval he could make out the gaslight glowing feebly like the tiny glare of a candle visible in some distant pit of darkness, but he could discern no shapes about the room. Not one!

A horrible fear stole into his breast and chilled it. All of him had suddenly come to naught, and just as he was getting started. He turned futile, streaming orbs up to where his new-made motto should loom upon the wall. It was there, of course, mocking at him now; but he could not see it. He could not see the wall even. For fully five minutes he sat in darkness, his hands clasped above his bowed head. Then he arose and groped his way along the wall to the door and opened it, and stood facing out into the grotesque dark of the studio. He thought of trying to grope his way across it—of calling out—but decided to wait a few minutes.

He felt stricken, broken, overwhelmed. His life, his career, himself were ruined. He required time to get used to the sensation, time to adjust his mind to the extent of the calamity and to gather some elements of fortitude wherewith to face the world. Not even Rose must see him broken and shattered as he felt right now.

Turning back, he closed the door, felt his way to the gas, and turned it off. He had no need of gas now. Then he lay down, fully clothed, upon the bed, with a cold cloth upon his eyes, thinking flightily and feeling very sorry for himself.

CHAPTER III

WHEN THE DARK WENT AWAY

+--------------------------------+
| 513 |
| General Freight Department |
| CALIFORNIA CONSOLIDATED |
| RAILWAY COMPANY |
| ROBERT MITCHELL, |
| General Freight Agent. |
| Walk in! |
+--------------------------------+

This was the sign on the door that John Hampstead had opened every morning for seven years. This morning he did not open it, and there was something like consternation when as late as nine-thirty the chair of the big, amiable, stenographic drudge was still vacant. Old Heitmuller, the chief clerk, after swearing his way helplessly from one point of the compass to another, was about to dispatch the office boy to Hampstead's residence.

Inside, and unaware of all this pother, sat the General Freight Agent. Big of body, with the topography of his father's heath upon his wide face, soft in the heart and hard in the head, Robert Mitchell was a man of no airs. His origin was probably shanty Irish, and he didn't care who suspected it. By painful labor, a ready smile, a hearty laugh, a square deal to his company and as square a deal to the public as he could give—"consistently"—he had got to his present modest eminence. He was going higher and was not particular who suspected that either; but was not boastful, had the respect of all men who knew him well, and the affection of those who knew him intimately.

He sat just now in a thoroughly characteristic pose, with the stubby fingers of one fat hand thoughtfully teasing a wisp of reddish brown hair, while his shrewd blue eyes were screwing at the exact significance of the top letter on a pile before him.

Over in a corner was Mitchell's guest and vast superior, Malden H. Hale, the president of the twelve thousand miles of shining steel which made up the Great South-western Railway System, in which Mitchell's little road nestled like a rabbit in the maw of a python. Mr. Hale was signing some letters dictated yesterday to John, finding them paragraphed and punctuated to his complete satisfaction, with here and there a word better than his own looming up in the context. For a time there was no sound save the scratching of his pen and the fillip of the sheets as he turned them over. Then he chuckled softly, and presently spoke.

"Bob," he said, "that's an odd genius, that stenographer out there."

"Yes," replied Mr. Mitchell absently, without looking up from his work, and then suddenly he stabbed the atmosphere with a significant rising inflection: "Genius?"

"Well, yes," affirmed Mr. Hale. "Genius! He impresses you first as absurdly incompetent, but his workmanship is really superior, and later you get a suggestion of something back of him, something buried that might come out, you know."

"I used to think so," the General Freight Agent replied, with a tone which indicated loss of interest in the subject, but being tardily overtaken in his reading by a sense that he had not quite done justice to the big stenographer, he broke the silence to add: "He is a fine character. He has very high thoughts,"—vacancy was in his eye for a moment,—"so high they're cloudy."

And that was all. Mr. Hale made no further comment. Mr. Mitchell, a just man, was satisfied that he had done justice. Thus in the minds of two arbiters of the destinies of many men, John Hampstead, loyal, laborious, who had served faithfully for seven years, was lifted for a moment until the sun of prospect flashed upon him,—lifted and then dropped. And they did not even know that nature, too, had dropped him,—that he was blind.

But just then a privileged person knocked and entered without waiting for an invitation. The newcomer was Doctor Gallagher, the "Company" oculist, his fine, dark eyes aglow with sympathy and importance.

"That boy Hampstead," he began abruptly, "is in bad shape."

"Hampstead!" ejaculated Mr. Mitchell antagonistically, as if it were impossible that lumbering mass of bone and muscle could ever be in bad shape.

"Yes," affirmed the physician, with the air of one who announces a sensation, "he's likely to go blind!"

"No!" ejaculated Mr. Mitchell, in still more emphatic tones of disbelief, though his blue eyes opened wide and grew round with shock and sympathetic apprehension.

"Yes," explained Doctor Gallagher volubly. "Continual transcription, the sweep of the eye from the notebook page to the machine and back, year in and year out, for so long, has broken down the muscular system of the eye. He had a blind spell last night. He can see all right this morning. But to let him go to work would be criminal. I have him in the Company Hospital for two weeks of absolute rest, and then he will be all right. But the typewriter, never again! You can put him on the outside to solicit freight, or something like that."

A broad grin overspread the features of the General Freight Agent. "You don't know John," he said. "That boy would die of nervousness the first day out. He's afraid of people. Besides," went on Mitchell, "we couldn't get along without him. He knows too much that nobody else knows."

"Well, anyway, never again the typewriter!" commanded the doctor from the door, getting out quickly and hurrying away with the consciousness of duty extremely well performed. He knew that he had exaggerated the extent of John's eye-trouble; but he believed that it was necessary to exaggerate it, both to Hampstead and to Mr. Mitchell.

In his darkened room at the hospital, John was feeling somehow suddenly honored of destiny. People were thinking, talking, caring about him. There was exaltation just in that. But also he was fuming. He wasn't ill. He was simply confined. He could not read. He could not write. He could do nothing but sit in a darkened room according to prescription, and wait. But on the third day Doctor Gallagher said:

"As soon as it is dusk, you may go out for a swift walk. That's to get exercise. Keep off the main streets; keep away from bright lights, do not try to read signs, to recognize people, or in fact to look at anything closely."

John leaped eagerly at this permission, but there was design in his devotion to the new prescription of which the doctor knew nothing. On the fifth day of his confinement, Tayna and Dick, who had been coming every afternoon to sit for an hour in the semi-darkness with their uncle, surprised the interned one doing odd contortions in the depths of his room: twisting his wrists; standing on one foot like a stork and twirling his great heel and toe from the knee in some eccentric imitation of a ballet dancer; then creeping to and fro across the room in a silly series of bowings and scrapings and salutings that threw Dick into irrepressible laughter. Caught shamefacedly in the very midst of these absurdities, John confessed to the two of them what he would at the moment have confessed to no other living being—last of all to Bessie.

"I am taking lessons," he said, "from an actor. He is going to make me easy and graceful, so people won't call me awkward any more—nor homely," and he looked significantly at Tayna.

"Oh," the children both gasped respectfully, and repeated with a kind of awe in their voices: "From an actor!"

"Yes. Every evening the doctor lets me go for a walk. On every other one of these walks I go to the actor's hotel, and he teaches me."

"Awh! An actor-r-r!" breathed Dick again, his features depicting profoundness both of impression and speculation.

"Say!" he proposed presently. "I would rather you would be an actor than a president, anyway."

John laughed. "I am not going to be an actor," he said, "I am only going to be polished till I shine like a human diamond." And then he devoted himself to the entertainment of his callers.

"Remember! Never again the typewriter!" the physician adjured sternly, when the fortnight of John's captivity was done. For although conveying this verdict immediately to Mitchell, the doctor had postponed its announcement to his patient till his discharge from the hospital. John was stunned. The typewriter was his bread. At first he rebelled, but with a rush like the swirl of waters over his head, the memory of that night when he was blind for an hour came to him and humbled him.

With the trembling courage of a coward, he opened the door of room 513; saw with sickening heart the strange face at his desk, shook the flabby hand of Heitmuller, and inwardly braced himself to enter for the last time between the double doors, where presently he confessed his plight as if it had been a crime.

"You don't imagine we would let you go, do you?" Mr. Mitchell asked, while an expression of amazement grew upon his face till it became a laugh. "Why, Jack"—Mr. Mitchell had never called him Jack before—"we should have to pay you a salary just to stick around and keep the rest of us straight."

The stenographer gulped. It was not the first note of praise he had ever received from this kindly railroad man, but it was the first time Mr. Mitchell or any one else in that whole office had ever acknowledged to John that he was valuable for what he knew as well as for what he beat out of his finger-tips.

"You are going to be my private secretary," explained Mr. Mitchell, still chuckling at the simplicity of John. "I have few letters to write, and you know enough to do most of them without dictation. You keep me reminded of things; handle my telephone calls and appointments. Gallagher says your eyes will probably give you no trouble whatever under these conditions. The salary will be fifteen dollars more a month."

The big awkward man was too confusedly grateful and overwhelmed even to attempt to murmur his thanks. Instead, he did a thing of unheard-of boldness. He reached over and touched the General Freight Agent on the arm,—just stabbed him in the upper, fleshy part of the arm with a thrust of his stiff fingers, accompanying the act with a monosyllabic croak. It was a clumsy touch, and it was presuming; but to a man of understanding, it was eloquent.

After one month in this new position, John found himself seeing the transportation business through new glasses. He had passed from details to principles, and the change stimulated his mind enormously.

One of his new duties now was to sit at the General Freight Agent's elbow in conferences, and later to make summaries of the arguments pro and con. In transcribing Mr. Mitchell's part of these talks, it interested John to elaborate a little. Soon he ventured to make the General Freight Agent's points stronger when he felt it could be done, and then waited, after laying the transcript on the big man's desk, for some word of reproof. Reproof did not come, and yet John thought the changes must be noticed.

But one day H. B. Anderson, Assistant General Freight Agent of the San Francisco and El Paso, a rival line, was in the office.

"Mitchell," Anderson began, "I am compelled to admit your argument reads a blamed sight stronger than it sounded to me the other day."

At this the General Freight Agent laughed complacently.

"The point about the demurrage especially," went on Anderson. "I didn't remember that somehow."

"Um," said the General Freight Agent in a puzzled way and picked up the transcript of the argument. As he scanned it, his face grew more puzzled; then light broke. "Yes," he replied emphatically, "that's the strongest point, in my judgment."

"Well," confessed Anderson, "it knocks me out. I am now agreeable to your construction."

The private secretary listened from his little cubby-hole with mingled exultation and apprehension. When the visitor had gone, the General Freight Agent walked in and tossed the transcript upon the secretary's table. John looked up timidly. The Mitchell brow was ridged and thoughtful.

"Hampstead," he declared with an air of grave reluctance, "I guess I'll have to lose you, after all."

"What, sir," gasped John, guilty terror shaking him somewhere inside.

At the change in John's face, Mitchell threw back his head and laughed; one of those huge, hearty, bellowing laughs at his own humor, from which he extracted so much enjoyment.

"Yes," he specified, "I am going to put you in the rate department. You have the making of a great railroad man in you. What you need now is the fundamentals. That's where you get 'em. Your brains are coming out, John. I always thought you had 'em,—but it certainly took you a long time to get any of them into the show window."

"It was seven years before you let me get to the window at all," suggested John, meaning to be a little bit vengeful.

"Nobody's fault but yours, my boy," said the G.F.A. brusquely, over his shoulder. "By the way," he remarked, turning back again, "you aren't afraid of people any more, either."

John flushed with pleasure. This was really the most desirable compliment Mitchell could bestow.

"I think I am getting a little more confidence in myself," the big man confessed, glowing modestly.

This was what three months of Kenton and "old Delsarte", as the actor called the great French apostle of intelligible anatomy, had done for John.

But Kenton and "old Delsarte" were doing something else to John that was vastly more serious, but of which Robert Mitchell received no hint until nearly a year later, when the knowledge came to him suddenly with a shock that jarred and almost disconcerted him. It was somewhere about noon of a day in February, and he had just touched the button for John Hampstead, rate clerk. Instead of John, Heitmuller answered the summons, laughing softly.

Now in the rate department John had made an amazing success. In six months gray-headed clerks were seeking his opinions earnestly. At the present moment he was in charge of all rates west of Ogden, Albuquerque, and El Paso, and half the department took orders from him.

"John's away at rehearsal," explained Heitmuller, still chuckling.

"At rehearsal?"

"Yes,—he's going to play Ursus, the giant, in Quo Vadis, with Mowrey's Stock Company at the Burbank next week."

"The hell!" ejaculated the General Freight Agent, while a look of blank astonishment came upon his usually placid features. "When did that bug bite him?"

"I can't tell yet whether it's a bite or only an itch," grinned Heitmuller. "For a while he was reciting at smokers and parties and things, and then I heard he was teaching elocution at home nights. Now he's got a small dramatic company and goes out around giving one-act plays and scenes from Shakespeare. Pretty good, too, they say!"

"Well, I be damned," Mitchell commented, when Heitmuller had finished.

"He's only away from eleven-thirty to one-thirty," explained Heitmuller. "He was so anxious and does so much more work than any two men that I couldn't refuse him."

"Of course not," assented Mitchell.

"Besides," added the chief clerk, "he might have gone, anyway. John's getting a little headstrong, I've noticed, since he's coming out so fast."

"Naturally," observed Mitchell drily, after which he dismissed Heitmuller and appeared to dismiss the subject by turning again to his desk.

CHAPTER IV

ADVENT AND ADVENTURE

But the General Freight Agent took care that Mrs. Mitchell, Bessie, and himself were in a box at the Burbank on the following Monday night, when the curtain went up on the Mowrey Stock Company's sumptuous production of Quo Vadis, which for more than nine days was the talk of the town in the city of angels, oranges, atmosphere, and oil. The Mitchells strained their eyes for a sight of their late-grown protégé, but it appeared he was not "on." However, in the midst of a garden scene with Roman lords, ladies, soldiers in armor and slaves decking the view, there appeared a huge barbarian, long of hair and beard, his torso bound round with an immense bearskin, his sandals tied with thongs, his sinewy limbs apparently unclad, savage bands of silver upon his massy, muscled arms, the alpine ruggedness of his countenance and the light of a fanatical devotion that gleamed in his eye contributing in their every detail to make the creature appear the thing the programme proclaimed him, "Ursus, a Christian Slave."

But the programme claimed something more: that this Ursus was John Hampstead.

Mitchell gaped and then rocked uneasily. The thing was unbelievable. If the man would only speak, perhaps some tone of voice—but the man did not speak, not even move. He stood half in the background, far up the center of the stage, while the talk and action of the piece went on beneath his lofty brow, like some mountain towering above a lakelet in which ripples sparkle and fish are leaping. At length, however, stage attention does center on Ursus, when the man enacting St. Peter, struck by the nature-man's appearance of gigantic strength, observes:

"Thou art strong, my son?"

The rugged human statue moved. In a voice that was low at first but broke quickly into reverberating tones which filled the theater to the rafters, the answer came:

"Holy Father! I can break iron like wood!"

As the speech was delivered, the eye of Ursus gleamed, the folded arms unbent, and one mighty muscle flexed the forearm through a short but significant arc, after which the figure resumed its pose of respectful but impressive immobility.

In that single speech and gesture Hampstead had achieved a personal success and keyed the play as plausible, for by it he had come to birth before a theater-full as a character equal to the prodigious feats of strength upon which the action turned.

"Go to the stable, Ursus!" commanded an authoritative voice.

The huge head of the hairy man, with its crown of long, wild locks was inclined humbly, and with an odd, rolling stride suggestive of enormous animal-like strength, he swung deliberately across the scene and out of it.

Robert Mitchell, staring fixedly, suddenly nodded his head with satisfaction. At last, in that careening walk, he had seen something that he recognized. That was the walk of Hampstead; but now Mitchell recalled it was long since he had seen that gait, long since he had heard the office door reverberate from a bang of one of those hip joints, long since the big man had made any conspicuous exhibition of the physical awkwardness that once had been so characteristic. And now? Why now John was an actor. Not Nero yonder, harp in hand, looked more nearly like his part. Hampstead had put on the pose, the voice, the walk, as he had put on the bearskin and the beard.

"Isn't he w-o-n-d-e-r-f-u-l?" breathed Bessie, with a little squeeze of her father's arm.

Mitchell laughed amiably and reached out for the curling lock upon his brow which was his mainstay in time of mental shipwreck and began to twist it, while he waited impatiently to see more of Ursus.

But the play appeared to have forgotten Ursus. A great party was on in the palace of Cæsar. The stage was alive with lights and music, and with the movements of many people—senators in togas, generals in armor, women with jewels in their hair and golden bands upon their white, gracefully swelling arms. There was drinking and laughter and high carousal. In right center, Cæsar upon his throne was singing and pretending to strike notes from a harp of pasteboard and gilt, notes which in reality proceeded from the orchestra pit. At lower left upon a couch sat Lygia, the Christian maiden, beautiful beyond imagining and being greatly annoyed by the love-makings of the half-intoxicated Roman soldier, Vinicius, who had laid aside his helmet and his sword, and was pleading with the lovely but embarrassed girl, at first upon his knees, then standing, with one knee upon the couch, while he trailed his fingers luxuriously through the glossy blackness of her hair.

As the love-making proceeded, Lygia's apprehension grew. When Vinicius pressed her tresses to his lips, she shrank from him. When, after another cup of wine and just as the whole court was in raptures over the conclusion of Cæsar's song, Vinicius attempted to place his kisses yet more daringly, Lygia started up with a cry of terror. Instantly there sounded from the wings a bellowing roar of rage, and like a flying fury, the wild, hairy figure of Ursus came bounding upon the scene.

Seizing Vinicius by the shoulders, Ursus shook him till all his harness rattled, then hurled him up stage and crashing to the floor. Lygia was swaying dizzily as if about to faint, but with another leap Ursus had gained her side and swung her into his arms, after which he turned and went hurdling across the stage, running in long, springing strides as lightly as a deer, the fair, delicious form of the girl balanced buoyantly on his arms, while her dark hair streamed out and downward over his shoulder—all of this to the complete consternation of the half-drunken Court of Cæsar and the vast and tumultuously expressed delight of the audience, which kept the curtain frisking up and down repeatedly over this climactic conclusion of the second act, while the principals posed and bowed and posed again and bowed again, to the audience, to themselves, and to the scenery. Robert Mitchell even supposed that Ursus was bowing to him, so being naturally polite and somewhat beside himself, the General Freight Agent was on the point of bowing back again when Bessie screamed:

"Oh! Oh! He bowed directly at me."

By this time, however, the curtain had recovered from its frenzy and stayed soberly down while the lights came up so the people could read the advertisements on the front. Immediately the tongues of the audience were all a-buzz, and industriously passing up and down the lines of the seats was the information that John Hampstead was a local character. "Oh, yes, indeed,—instructor in public speaking at the Young Men's Christian Association."

In due course, this piece of interesting information reached the Mitchells in their box.

"I knew it all along," gurgled Bessie proudly.

"I begin to be jealous," announced Mrs. Mitchell, broad of face, expansive of heart, aggressive of disposition. "I want all these people to know that Ursus is our rate clerk."

"And I want them to know," said Mr. Mitchell, by way of venting his disapproval, "that he is spoiling a mighty good rate clerk to make a mighty poor actor."

"But," pouted the loyal Bessie, "he is not a poor actor. He's a w-o-n-d-e-r-f-u-l actor! You are spoiling the plain truth to make a poor epigram. You," and she looked up pertly at her father, "you are just a bunch of sour grapes! You kept my poor Jack's nose on the grindstone so long that he broke out in a new place, and now you are afraid you'll lose him."

"Your poor Jack!" sneered Mrs. Mitchell merrily.

"Yes—mine!" answered Bessie stoutly. "I always told you Jack Hampstead was a great man in disguise. I saw him first—before he saw himself, almost. I'm going to be his friend for always and for always. Oh, look there!"

The curtain had gone up on an odd, out-of-the-way corner of the imperial city. There had been some colloquy over the gate of a small close, participated in by the vibrant voice of an unseen Ursus and the calmer one of a visible St. Peter, after which the gate opened and Ursus entered, bearing the still fainting form of Lygia in his arms; giving, of course, the desired impression that this fair figure of a woman had been nestling on his great bosom ever since the curtain went down some twelve minutes before, an inference that led some of the clerks in the General Freight Office and other persons scattered through the audience, to envy John. This presumption, however, was some distance from the truth. As a matter of fact, Lygia had but recently resumed her position in the arms of Ursus, while two stage hands, lying prone, had plucked open the gate; and various happenings quite unsuspected of the audience had intervened, at least one of which had been a severe shock to the Puritan nature of John Hampstead.

However, there was the dramatic impression already referred to, and it ate its way like acid into the consciousness of at least one person in the playhouse.

Ursus, after looking about him for a moment in the little yard of the Christian's house to make sure he was entirely surrounded by friends, drew his fair burden closer and, as if by a protective instinct, bent over it with a look of tenderness so long and concentrated that his flaxen beard toyed with the white cheek, and his flaxen locks gleamed for a moment amid the raven ones.

"Well," commented Bessie, in a tone that mingled sharp annoyance with that judicially critical note which is the right of all high-school girls in their last year, "I do not see any dramatic necessity for prolonging this. Why doesn't he stick her face under the fountain there for a moment and then lay her on the grass?"

Mercifully, Bessie was not compelled to contain her annoyance too long. Ursus did eventually relinquish his hold upon the lady, and the piece moved on from scene to scene to the final holocaust of Rome.

With the news instinct breaking out above the critical, the dramatic columns of the morning papers gave the major stickful of type to the performance of that histrionic athlete, John Hampstead, forgetting to mention his connection with the Y.M.C.A., but making clear that in daylight he was a highly respected member of the staff of Robert Mitchell, the well-known railroad man.

But to John, the process of conversion from rate clerk to actor had been even more exciting than the demonstration of the fact proved to his friends.

To begin with, it was an experience quite unforgettable to the chairman of the Prayer Meeting Committee of the Christian Endeavor Society of the grand old First Church when for the first time he found himself upon the stage of the Burbank at rehearsal time, with twenty-five or thirty real actors and actresses about him. He looked them over curiously, with a puritanic instinct for moral appraisal, as they stood, lounged, sat, gossiped, smoked, laughed or did several of these things at once; yet all keeping a wary eye and ear for the two men who sat at the little table in the center of the bare, empty stage with their heads together over a manuscript.

"Just about like other people," confessed Hampstead to himself, with something of disappointment.

There were some tailor suited women, there were some smartly dressed young men, there were some very nice girls, not more than a whit different in look and manner from the typists in the general office. There were two or three gray-haired men who, so far as appearance and demeanor went, might have served as deacons of the First Church. There were a couple of dignified, matronly-looking elderly ladies with fancy-work or mending in their laps, as they swayed to and fro in the wicker rockers that were a part of the furnishings for Act II of the play then running. These two ladies, so far as John could see, might have been respectively President of the Ladies' Aid and of the Woman's Missionary Society, instead of what they were, "character old women," as he later learned.

Totaling his impressions, Mowrey's Stock Company seemed like a large exclusive family in which he was suffered but not seen. Nobody introduced him to anybody. Mowrey merely threw him a glance, and that was not of recognition but of observation that he was present.

"First act!" snapped the manager, with a voice as sharp as the clatter of the ruler with which he rapped upon the table. Stepping forward, prompt book in one hand, ruler in the other for a pointer, he began to outline the scene upon the bare stage:

"This chair is a tree—that stage brace is a bench—this box is a rock," and so forth.

The rehearsal had begun. It moved swiftly, for Mowrey was a man with snap to him. His words were quick, nervous, few—until angry. His glance was imperative. It was all business, hot, relentless pressure of human beings into moulds, like hammering damp sand in a foundry.

"Go there! Stand here! Laugh! Weep! Look pleased! Feign intoxication!" Each short word was a blow of Mowrey's upon the wet human sand.

John's name was never mentioned. Mowrey called him by the name of his part, Ursus. Ursus was "on" in the first act, but with nothing to do, and his eyes were wide with watching. One woman in particular attracted him. She was tall and shapely, clad in a close-fitting tailored suit, with hat and veil that seemed to match both her garments and herself. She moved through her part with a kind of distinguished nonchalance, her veil half raised, and a vagrant fold of it flicking daringly at a rosy spot on her cheek when she turned suddenly; while in her gloved hands she held a short pencil with which, from time to time, additional stage directions were noted upon the pages of her part. This accomplished and really beautiful young actress was Miss Marien Dounay, one of the two leading women of the company.

Hampstead was inexperienced of women. He confessed it now to himself. But this was to be the day of his opportunity, and he felt the blood of adventure leaping in his veins. In his consciousness, too, floated little arrows like indicators, and as if by common agreement, they pointed their heads toward Miss Dounay.

If it were she now who played Lygia? Yes; it was she. They were calling her Lygia. Hampstead smiled to himself. Presently he chuckled softly, and the chuckle appeared to loose a small avalanche of new-born emotions that leaped and jumbled somewhere inside.

But the first encounter was disappointing. Miss Dounay seized him by the arm, without a glance,—her eyes being fixed on Mowrey,—and led the big man out of the scene exactly as if he had been a wooden Indian on rollers.

"Now," she said, "you have just carried me off." Her voice had wonderful tones in it, tones that started more avalanches inside; but she appeared as unconscious of the tones and their effect as of him. She was making another note in her part.

"Better practice that 'carry off stage' before we try it at rehearsal," called the sharp voice of Mowrey. His eyes and his remark were addressed to Miss Dounay. Miss Dounay nodded.

"Shall we?" she said, and looked straight at Hampstead, giving him his first glance into self-confident eyes which were clear, brownish-black, with liquescent, unsounded depths. In form it was a question she had asked; in effect it was a command from a very cool and business-like young person.

"I presume we had better," said John, affecting a foolish little laugh, which did not, however, get very far because the earnest air of Miss Dounay was inhospitable to levity.

"See here!" she instructed. "I throw up my arms in a faint. My left arm falls across your right shoulder. At the same time I give a little spring with my right leg, and I throw up my left leg like this. At the same instant you throw your right arm under my shoulders, your left arm gathers my legs; I will hold 'em stiff. There!"

Miss Dounay's arm was on John's shoulder, and she was preparing to suit the rest; of her action to her words. "Without any effort to lift me," she continued, talking now into his ear, "I will be extended in your arms. All you have to do is to be taking your running stride as I come to you, and after that to hold me poised while you bound off the stage. Can you do it?"

With this crisp, challenging question on her lips, Miss Dounay completed the proposed manoeuvre of her lower limbs, and John found himself with the long, exquisitely moulded body of a beautiful woman balancing in his arms, while a foolish quiver passed over him and shook him till he actually trembled.

A foolish quiver passed over him and shook him till he actually trembled.

"Am I so heavy?" asked a matter-of-fact voice from his shoulder.

"You are not heavy at all," replied Hampstead, hotly provoked at himself.

"Run, then," she commanded.

The resultant effort was a few staggering, ungraceful steps.

"Dounay weighs a hundred and fifty if she weighs an ounce," said a passing voice.

John, all chagrin as he deposited the lady upon her feet, saw her lip curl, and her dark eyes flash scornfully at the leading juvenile man who, with grimacing intent to tease, had made the remark to the ingenue as both passed near.

"Insolence!" hissed Miss Dounay after the scoffer, and turned again to Hampstead, speaking sharply. "Very bad! You must be in your running stride when my weight falls on you. We must practice."

And practice they did, at every spare moment of the rehearsal during the entire week. From these "practices", Hampstead learned an unusual number of things about women which, in his limited experience, he had either not known or which had not been brought home to him before. Some of these he presumed applied generally to all women; others, he had no doubt, were particular to Miss Dounay.

As, for instance, when he looked down at her face where it lay in the curve of his arm, he saw that the oval outline of her cheeks was startlingly perfect; that there were pools of liquid fire in her eyes; that her lips were beautifully and naturally red; that they were long, pliable, sensitive, with fleeting curves that raced like ripples upon these shores of velvet and ruby, expressing as they ran an infinite variety of passing moods. The chin, too, came in for a great deal of this attention. It was round and smooth at the corners, with a delicately chiseled vertical cleft in it, which at times ran up and met a horizontal cleft that appeared beneath the lower lip, when any slight breath of displeasure brought a pout to that ruby, pendant lobe. This meeting-place of the two clefts formed a kind of transitory dimple, a trysting-place of all sorts of fugitive attractions which exercised a singular fascination for the big man.

He used to wonder what the sensation would be like to sink his lips in that precious, delectable valley. It would have been physically simple. A slight lifting of his right arm and shoulder, a slight declension of his neck, and the mere instinctive planting of his lips, and the thing was done. However, John had no thought of doing this. In the first place he wouldn't—without permission; for he was a man of honor and of self-control. In the second place, he wouldn't because a woman was a thing very sacred to him, and a kiss, a deliberate and flesh-tingling kiss, was a caress to be held as sacred as the woman herself and for the expression of an emotion he had not yet felt for any woman; a statement which to the half-cynical might prove again that John Hampstead was a very inexperienced and very monk-minded youth indeed to be abroad in the unromanticism of this twentieth century. Yet the fact remains that Hampstead did not consciously conspire to violate the neutrality of this tiny, alluring haunt of tantalizing beauty which lurked bewitchingly between the red lower lip and the white firm chin of Miss Marien Dounay.

But there were other things that John was learning swiftly, some of which amounted to positive disillusionment. One was that a woman's body is not necessarily so sacred nor so inviolate, after all. That instead of inviolate, it may be made inviolable by a sort of desexing at will. Miss Dounay could do this and did do it, so that for instance when her form stiffened in his arms, it was no more like what he supposed the touch of a woman's body should be than a post. In the first place the body itself, beneath that trim, tailored suit, appeared to be sheathed in steel from the shoulder almost to the knee. John had supposed that corsets were to confine the waist. This one, if that were what it was and not some sort of armor put on for these rehearsals, encased the whole body.

Another thing that contributed to this desexing of the female person was Miss Dounay's bearing toward himself. He might have been a mere mechanical device for any regard she showed him at rehearsals. She pushed or pulled him about, commanded the bend and adjustment of his arms as if he had been an artificial man, and never by any hint indicated that she thought of him as a person, least of all as a male person. Undoubtedly this robbed his new adventure of some of its spice. But a change came. When for five days John was undecided whether he should admire this manner of hers as supreme artistic abstraction or resent it as supercilious disdain, Margaret O'Neil, one of the character old ladies who had constituted herself a combination of critic and chaperone of these "carry" practices, turned, after a word with Miss Dounay, and said:

"We should like to know who it is that is carrying us about."

"Why, certainly," exclaimed John, all his doubt disappearing in a toothful smile as he swept off his hat. "My name is Hampstead, John Hampstead."

"Miss Dounay, allow me to present Mr. Hampstead," said Miss O'Neil, without the moulting of an eyelash.

Miss Dounay extended her hand cordially for a lofty, English handshake, accompanied by an agreeable smile and a chuckling laugh, understood by John to be in recognition of the oddness of the situation.

After this, things were somewhat different. There was less sense of strain on his part, and he began to realize that there had been some strain upon hers which now was relaxed. Her body was less post-like; and toward the end of rehearsal, when possibly she was a little tired, it lay in his arms quite placidly, relaxing until its curves yielded and conformed to the muscular lines of his own torso.

Yet Miss Dounay never betrayed the slightest self-consciousness at such moments. Whatever the woman as woman might be, she was, as an actress, so absolutely devoted to the creation of the character she was rehearsing, so painstakingly careful to reproduce in every detail of tone and action the true impression of a pure-minded, Christian maiden that Hampstead, with his firm religious backgrounding, unhesitatingly imputed to the woman herself all the virtues of the chaste and incomparable Lygia.

When dress-rehearsal time came at midnight on Sunday, just after the regular performance had been concluded, and John saw Miss Dounay for the first time in the dress of the character, his soul was enraptured. The simple folds of her Grecian robe were furled at the waist and then swept downward in one billowy leap, unrelieved in their impressive whiteness by any touch of color, save that afforded by the jet-bright eyes with their assumed worshipful look and the wide, flowing stream of her dark, luxuriant hair, which, loosely bound at the neck, waved downward to her hips. The devout curve of her alabaster neck, the gleaming shoulders, the full, tapering, ivory arms, her sandaled bare feet—yes, John looked close to make sure, and they were actually bare—rounded out the picture.

Marien Dounay stood forth more like an angel vision than a woman, at once so beautiful and so adorable that big, sincere, open-eyed John Hampstead worshipped her where she stood—worshipped her and loved her—as a man should love an angel. Yet as he looked, he was almost guiltily conscious that he knew a secret about this angelic vision,—that this chiseled flesh with rounded, shapely contours that would be the despair of any sculptor was not as marble-like as it looked, was, indeed, soft to the touch and warm, radiant and magnetic.

And John, blissfully aglow with his spiritual ardor, had no faint suspicion that his secret might kill his illusion dead, nor that his devotion would survive that decease, although something very like this happened on the night of the first performance.

The great second act was on. Things were not going as smoothly as they appeared to from the front. Even the inexperienced Hampstead, as he waited for his cue, could see that his angel was being enormously vexed by the manner in which Vinicius made love. Henry Lester was a brilliant actor, but flighty and erratic. During rehearsal Mowrey had much trouble in getting him to memorize accurately the business of his part. He would do one thing one way to-day and forget it or reverse it on the next. To-night Lester was committing all these histrionic crimes. Miss Dounay had continually to adapt herself to his impulsive erraticisms, to shift speeches and alter business. The climax of exasperation came when one of the wide metal circlets upon his arm became entangled in the gossamer threads of Lygia's hair and pulled it painfully. Yet the actress was sufficiently accomplished to play her own part irreproachably and deliver John's cue at the right moment to secure the startling entrance already described, and thus to be gracefully and dramatically swept away from the rude advances of her importunate lover.

It was at the end of this particular scene and off stage, when the curtain was descending to the accompaniment of applause from the audience, that the death of John's illusion came. For a delicious instant, he was still holding Lygia from the floor as if instinctively sheltering her amidst the general confusion of crowding actors and hurrying stage hands. Nothing loth, she lay at rest, with eyes closed and features composed as if in the faint. To the raw, impressionable young man, Marien had never looked so much an angel as at this moment; and now she was coming to, as if still in character. Her eyelids fluttered but did not open, and then her lips moved slightly, stiffly, under their load of greasy carmine, as if she would speak. In self-forgetful ecstasy, Hampstead bent eagerly to receive the confidence. Perhaps she was going to thank him, to whisper a word of congratulation. Whatever the communication might be, his soul was in raptures of delightful anticipation as he felt her breath upon his cheek.

The communication was made promptly and unhesitatingly, after which Miss Dounay alertly swung her feet to the floor and walked out upon the stage to receive her curtain call, leading Ursus by the hand, mentally dazed, inwardly wabbling, outwardly bowing,—trying, in fact, to do just as the others did. But in John's mind now there was this numbing sense of shock, for he could not refuse to believe his ears, and what this angelic vision had breathed into them in tones of cool, emphatic conviction, was:

"What a damn fool that man Lester is!"

Off the stage again Hampstead stumbled about amid flying scenery, racing stage hands, and a surging mass of supernumeraries, like a man recovering consciousness. He wanted to get out of sight somewhere. He had the feeling of having been stripped naked. Every vestige of his religious adoration had been dynamited out of existence. This was no Christian maiden but an actress playing a part. As for the woman herself, she was very blasé and very modern, who, at this moment, as he could see by a glance into the open door of her dressing room, was sitting with crossed knees, head back and enveloped in a halo of smoke, while her pretty lips were distended in a yawn, and the spark of a cigarette glowed in her finger tips.

"And I am another!" Hampstead muttered, with a sneer that was aimed inward.

Seven minutes later, Lygia walked out of her dressing room minus the cigarette and looking again that angel vision, but Hampstead knew better now. He viewed her at first critically and then reflectively; but was presently startled at the gist of his reflections, which was a sort of self-congratulation because this creature that he was about to take in his arms was not an angel, but that more alluring, less elusive thing, a woman.

Two more minutes and the pair of stage hands were stretched stomach-wise upon the floor ready to swing open the wings of the gate at the cue from St. Peter, and Lygia was lying once more in John's arms. In the instant of waiting before the curtain rose, he had time to notice how contentedly and trustfully she appeared to nestle there. Her breathing was like his at first, easy and natural; but gradually, as the moment of suspense lengthened and the instant of action drew near, the rhythmic pulse of both bosoms accelerated, as if, heart on heart, their souls beat in unison. John was noticing, too, how soft Marien's body was where the armor did not extend, how deliciously warm it was, indeed how something like an ethereal heat radiated from it and filled all his veins with a strange, electric, impulsive wistfulness. What was that giddy perfume?

Involuntarily he drew her closer, with a gentle, steady pressure. At this she raised her eyelids and gazed at him for a moment, contemplatively first and then passively curious, after which she lowered the lids again, while her lips half parted in a voiceless sigh.

So far as Hampstead was concerned, illusion had gone. He knew that he was just a man. So far as Miss Dounay was concerned, he suspected that she was just a woman. But devotion remained. John did not relax his hold. Instead there was a momentary tightening of his arms.

"Let 'er go," called the low, tense voice of Mowrey; and with a rustling sound the great curtain slipped slowly upward.

CHAPTER V

THE RATE CLERK

The week went by like a shot. On Sunday night the glory that was a very stagy Rome burned down for the last time beneath the gridiron of the old Burbank Theater. On Monday morning no odor of grease paint and no noxious smell of stewing glue, which proclaims the scene painter at his work, was in the nostrils of John. Instead, the clack of typewriters, the tinkle of telephone bells, the droning voices of dictators, and the shuffling feet of office boys filled his ears.

As if to completely re-merge the man in his environment, Robert Mitchell came walking in, tossed a bundle of papers upon the desk, fixed the rate clerk with a shaft of his blue eye, and commanded drily:

"Ursus! Make a set of tariffs embracing our new lines to correspond with the commodity tariffs of the San Francisco and El Paso."

John colored slightly at the thrust of that name Ursus, but looked Mr. Mitchell fairly and meekly in the eye and answered:

"Yes, sir."

"Have them effective July 1st," concluded the General Freight Agent, as he turned away.

Burman, the lordly through rate clerk, lowered his sleek face behind his books and snickered. John shot a scowl at Burman and then for a few minutes hunched his shoulders over the documents in the case.

The California Consolidated was being consolidated some more. Two more roads in the big system had just been pitchforked into the jurisdiction of Robert Mitchell, adding twelve hundred additional miles to his responsibility and pushing him several swift rounds up the ladder of promotion.

These additions made the California Consolidated competitive with the San Francisco and El Paso lines at hundreds of new stations. John's job was to consolidate the freight tariffs of the three lines and make sure that they equalized the rates of the competitor at competing stations. It was an enormous task, and the General Freight Agent had breezily commanded it to be done in ten weeks. That was why Burman snickered. It was also why Hampstead scowled.

Now a freight tariff starts youthfully out to be the most scientific thing in the world, but it ends by being the most utterly unscientific document that ever was put together. The longer a tariff lives, the more depraved it becomes. The S.F. & E.P. tariffs were very old, but not, therefore, honorable.

John turned to the shelf that contained them and scowled again, a double scowl, as black as his blond Viking brows could manage. These were to be his models. They were yellow—a disagreeable color to begin with,—each a half inch thick and larger than a letter page,—abortions, every one of them! They were pea-vine growths like the monster system which issued them, cumbered with the adjustments and easements of the years.

The flour tariff! The hay tariff! The grain tariff! John took these in his hands one by one and glowered at them. The mistakes, the inconsistencies, the clumsiness of thirty sprawling years were in them. And he was asked to duplicate these confusions on his own system.

Should he do it? No; be hanged if he would! He felt big and self-important as he slammed the first of them face down upon his desk and each thereafter in succession upon its fellow, until the pile toppled over, after which, leaving the reckless heap behind him, while Burman snickered again, John stamped out of the room.

"These S.F. & E.P. tariffs are so old they've got whiskers on 'em," he began to say to Mr. Mitchell, "and hairs! And the hair has never been cut nor even combed. They have been tagged and fattened and trimmed and sliced and slewed round till the tariff is issued just to keep up the basis and the tradition, and then you look in something else,—an amendment, or a special, or a 'private special', or sometimes the carbon copy of a letter,—to find out what the rate actually is. Sometimes when I call their office up on the 'phone to get a rate, it takes 'em twenty-four hours to answer, and maybe a week later they notify me the answer was wrong. Our slate is clean; why not simmer the figures down to what is the actual basis instead of the assumed one, and publish the rates as we intend to charge 'em, and as we know they do charge 'em?"

Mitchell had listened with surprise at first to this rash proposal. It sounded youthful and impetuous. But it also sounded sensible. Mitchell hated red tape, and he knew that John's idea was the right one; but tradition was god on the S.F. & E.P. They would fight the innovation and fight it hard; they might win, too, and Mr. Mitchell had no stomach for tilting at windmills. However, it might be a good thing for John, this fight; might make him forget that foolish stage ambition of his; and if he won, might crown him so lustrously that of itself it would save him to a future already assuredly brilliant in the railroad business.

"Do you think you could whip it out with 'em before their faces, John, when the scrap comes?" Mr. Mitchell asked tentatively, but also by way of further firing the soul of the fighter.

"I believe I could," replied John ardently.

"Then go to it," said Mr. Mitchell tersely.

And John went to it.

But there was another man who had been shocked by John's theatrical venture, and that was the pastor of the First Church, who had his virtues, much as other men. His face was round and like his figure, full of fatness. He was a merry soul and loved a joke. He had a heart as tender as his sense of humor was keen.

But beside his virtues, this man of God had also his convictions. His pulpit was no wash-wallowing craft. He steered her straight. To Heaven with Scylla! To Gehenna with Charybdis! Indeed, if there was one man in all Los Angeles who knew where he was going and all the rest of the world too, it was this same Charles Thompson Campbell, pastor of the aforesaid grand old First Church. Doctor Campbell's hair and eyes were black. His voice had the ultimate roar in it. When he stood up, locks flying, perspiration streaming, and thumped his pulpit with that fat doubled fist, the palm of which had been moulded in youth upon the handle of a plow, every nook and cranny of the auditorium echoed with the force of his utterance. But Doctor Campbell's convictions, like most people's, were only in part based upon knowledge.

Some things in particular he wot not of yet scorned. One was the modern novel. Another was the stage! Shakespeare, Doctor Campbell admitted largely, had shed some sheen upon the stage and more upon literature; but he never quoted Shakespeare. One could almost doubt if he had read him, and when Shakespeare came to town, he never went to see him.

On the morning, therefore, when the good Doctor Campbell read in the papers that the youngest of his deacons had the night before made his debut as Ursus in Quo Vadis, he was not only pained but moved to self-reproach. Grief enveloped him. It thrust the sharp cleft of a frown into his smooth brow. It thrust his chin down upon his bosom and caused him to heave a tumultuous sigh. He bowed his head beside his study table and then and there put up an earnest petition for the soul of John Hampstead. It was a sincere and natural prayer, because Doctor Campbell was a sincere man and believed in the efficacy of prayer.

Besides, he loved John Hampstead. The young man's impending fate stirred the minister deeply and caused him to reproach himself. In this mood, he dug out all his sermons on the stage, nine years of annual sermons on the influence of the drama, and read them sketchily and with disappointment. Paugh! Piffle! How weak and ineffective they seemed. He delved into his concordance for a text and found one. Then he drove his pen deep into his inkwell and began to write.

The following Sunday night Doctor Campbell's red, excited features were seen dimly through dun, sulphurous clouds of brimstone and fire; but to the preacher's dismay, John Hampstead was not present for fumigation. The reverend gentleman, in his unthinking goodness, had quite overlooked the fact that the play in which John was performing concluded on Sunday night instead of Saturday night; and so while his pastor was hurling his fiery diatribes at that conspicuously assailable institution, the stage, Deacon Hampstead was blissfully bearing Marien Dounay about in his arms.

But the next morning John read the sermon published in the newspaper. He had already noted that the more doubtful the sermon, the more likely it is to get into the headlines, because from the editor's standpoint it thus becomes news, and late Sunday night, which is the scarcest hour of the whole week for news, there is more joy in the "city room" over one sermon that breathes the fiery spirit of sensation than over ninety and nine which need no hell and damnation in which to express the tender gospel of Jesus. John read it with a sense of wrath, of outrage, and of humiliation. That night he launched himself at the study door of his pastor.

"I was very sorry you did not hear my sermon last night," began Doctor Campbell blandly, sensing the advantage of striking first.

"Brother Campbell, I have come to arraign you for that sermon," retorted John, with an immediate outburst of feeling. "I say that you spoke what you did not know. I say," and his voice almost broke with the weight of its own earnestness, "I say that you bore false witness!"

The amazed minister's mouth opened, but John repressed his utterance with a gesture.

"You will say you preached your convictions. I say you preached your prejudice, your ignorance. I say you bore false witness against struggling women, against aspiring men, against those of whose bitter battlings you know nothing."

The Reverend Charles Thompson Campbell leaned back aghast. No man had ever presumed to talk to him like this, no man of twice his years and spiritual attainments; yet here was this stripling not only talking to him like this, but with a fervor of unction in his utterance that made his upbraiding sound half inspired.

"You are condemning the stage as an institution," went on John scornfully. "You might as well condemn the printing press as an institution. You discriminate with regard to newspapers and books. Do the same with the stage. Taboo the corrupt play and teach your people to avoid it. Support the good and teach the managers that you will. Taboo the notorious actor or actress if you wish. Give the rest of them the benefit of the doubt, as you do in your personal contact with all humanity. Oh, Doctor Campbell, you are so charitable in your personal relations with men and so uncharitable in much of your preaching!"

This one exclamatory sentence had in it enough of affectionate regard to enable the minister to contain himself a little longer, under the impassioned tide which now flowed again.

"The stage? The stage as an institution?" John appeared to pause and wind himself up. "Why, listen! The stage function is a godlike function. When God created man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into him the breath of life he planted in man's breast also the instinct to create. That instinct is the foundation of all art. Man has always exhibited this passion to create something in his own image. It might be a rude drawing on a rock, or only a manikin sculptured in mud and set in the sun to dry; or it might be a marble of Phidias, with the form, the strength, the spirit of life upon it. The painter can go farther. He gets the color and the very visage of thought and even of emotion. Yet each falls short. There is no God to breathe into their creations the breath of life."

The minister leaned back a little as if to put his understanding more at poise.

"But," continued Hampstead, "the playwright and the actor can go farther. They breathe into their creations that very breath of God himself, which he breathed into man. They make a character real because he is a living man. They put him in the company of other men and women who are as real for the same reason; they toss them all into the sea of life together; the winds of life blow upon them. Hate and love, virtue and vice, hope and despair, weakness and strength, birth and death, work their will upon them."

"That is very beautiful, John," said Doctor Campbell, "very beautiful."

The tribute was sincere, but John was not to be checked even by a compliment.

"The stage creates and recreates," he rushed on. "It can raise the dead. It makes men and women live again—Julius Cæsar and Cleopatra, Napoleon and Dolly Madison. It seizes whole segments out of the circles of past history and sets them down in the midst of to-day, with the glow of life and the sheen of reality over all, so that for an afternoon or a night we live in another continent or another age. We see the life, the customs, the petty quarrels, the sublimer passions, the very pulse-beats of men of other circumstances and other generations than our own, so that when we come out of the theater into the times of to-day, we have actually to wake ourselves up and ask: Which is real, and which is art?"

Doctor Campbell leaned forward now. His mouth was round, his eyes were widely open.

"It is that which gives the stage its dignity and power," concluded John. "It is the highest expression of man's instinct to create a new life in a more ideal Eden than that in which he finds himself. When you condemn the stage you condemn the creative instinct, and," exhorted John, with the sudden sternness of a hairy prophet on his desert rock, "you had better pause to think if you do not condemn Him who planted that instinct in the human breast."

Hampstead had now finished; but the minister was in no hurry to speak. He felt the spell of the picture which had been painted, but he felt still more the spell of the young man's ardent enthusiasm.

"You must have thought that out very carefully, John," he said.

"Brother Campbell!" answered John fervently, "I have done more than think it out. I have felt it out. I propose to live it out!"

But Doctor Campbell had kept his head amid this swirl of words, and his return was quietly forceful.

"The stage of to-day," he began, "as I know it from the newspapers and the billboards, never seemed so vulgar and damnable as it does now after your glorious idealization of it. I, as a preacher of righteousness, must judge of such an institution externally, by its effects. I have weighed the stage in the balance, John, and I have found it wanting."

This time there was something in the minister's calm tone, in the cool detachment of his point of view, that held John silent.

"Isn't it possible," the minister continued, in a kind of sweet reasonableness, "that there is something insidiously demoralizing or infectious about it? Take your own experience, John. You are a Christian man. You have been soaking yourself in the atmosphere of the stage for a couple of weeks. Examine your soul now, and answer me if you are as fine, as pure a man as you were before you went there. Are you?"

"Why, of course I am," ejaculated Hampstead impulsively.

"Think," commanded the minister, in low, compelling tones; for having controlled his emotions the better, he was just now the stronger of the two. "Are you—John?"

Hampstead opened his mouth eagerly, but the minister's repressing gesture would not let him speak. The young man was literally compelled to think, to question his own soul for a moment, and as he searched, a telltale flush came upon his cheek, and then his glance fell. There was an embarrassing moment of silence, during which this flush of mortification deepened perceptibly.

The minister was a wise man. He read the sign and asked no questions. He upbraided nothing, cackled no exultant, "I told you so."

"Let us pray, Brother John," he proposed after the interval, and knelt by his chair with a hand upon Hampstead's shoulder. The prayer was short.

"Oh, Lord," the man of God petitioned, "help us to know where the right stops and the wrong begins. Keep us back from the sin of presumption. Give thy servants wisdom to serve thy cause well and work no ill to it by over-zeal or over-confidence. Amen!"

Doctor Campbell might have been praying for himself. But John knew that this was only a part of his tact.

As the two men rose, John felt a sudden impulse to defend the stage from himself.

"It was my own fault," he urged; "the fault of my own weakness in unaccustomed surroundings. It was not the fault of the surroundings themselves, nor of any other person. Besides, it was nothing very grave."

"Deterioration of character is always grave," said the Reverend Charles Thompson Campbell as he walked to the door with his caller, and the minister's tone intimated his conviction that this particular deterioration had been very grave indeed.

CHAPTER VI

ON TWO FRONTS

There was high commotion in a big front office in the top floor of a tall, gray building that stood in the days before the fire on the corner of Kearney and Market streets in the city of San Francisco. This gray structure housed the general offices of the San Francisco and El Paso Railroad Company, and that big front office contained the desk of the Freight Traffic Manager. Before this desk sat a man with a domed brow and the beak of an eagle, hair gray, eyes piercing, complexion colorless, and a mouth that closed so tightly it was discernible only as a crescent-shaped pucker above his spike-like chin. His mouth at the moment was not a pucker; it was a geyser. The name of this man was William N. Scofield, and he was obviously in a rage. He had grown up with the S.F. & E.P., his brain expanding as it expanded, his power rising as it had risen. Long ago, when the one lone clerk in its little rate department, he had made with his own hands the first of those yellow commodity tariffs that John Hampstead had scorned with objurgations. Now Scofield held in the hand which trembled with his anger the first of that upstart's own contributions to the science of tariff making—not yellow, but white, in token of the clarity it was meant to introduce.

"How did they make it? this—this botch!" he exploded, repeating his interrogation with other embellishing phrases not properly reproducible and then slamming the offending white sheets down hard upon his desk,—much harder than John had slammed the yellow ones,—this impudent, white-livered thing that was an assault upon the customs he, Scofield, had instituted and time itself had honored!

"Telegram!" he barked to his stenographer. "Robert Mitchell, Los Angeles. Insist immediate withdrawal your entire line of commodity tariffs, series J. Basis carried in our own tariffs is only one we will recognize."

Mitchell answered:

"Decline to withdraw; our tariffs issued on actual basis on which charges are assessed."

The fight was on.

Arming himself cap-a-pie with tariffs, amendments, letters, and memoranda, Mitchell two days later followed his telegram to San Francisco. Most of his resources, however, were packed behind the wide, blond brow of John Hampstead, who accompanied his chief and was more eager for the fray than Mitchell. The battle began on Monday morning about ten of the clock, and was not finished with the day. The field of action was a room of this same gray building, where Howison, General Freight Agent of the S.F. & E.P., sat at the end of a long table, flanked right and left by assistant general freight agents, rate clerks, and even general and district freight agents called in from the field, all to convince Robert Mitchell and his lone rate clerk sitting at the other end of the table that their new tariff was a hodgepodge, without practical basis or the show of reason to support it. Scofield himself did not take a seat in the battle line, but looked in occasionally, either to walk about nervously or sit just back of Howison's shoulder.

On the afternoon of the second day, the enemy Traffic Manager appeared to watch Hampstead intently for half an hour. Again and again the keen old fighter saw his allied forces attack, but invariably this self-confident, smiling young man with a ready citation, the upflashing of a yellow "special", the digging out of a letter or a telegram from his file, or occasionally even of an old freight bill issued by the S.F. & E.P. showing exactly what rate had been assessed, triumphantly repelled the assaults, until reverses began to be the order of the day.

"It strikes me," Scofield remarked sarcastically, "that this young man has got us all pretty well buffaloed. The trouble is, Howison," he glowered, "that your Tariff Department needs cleaning out. You've got a lot of old mush heads in there."

With this warning shot into his own ranks, Scofield arose, went discontentedly out, and never once came back. Keener than any of his staff, he had already discerned that defeat was advancing down the road.

But the battle of the tariffs raged on throughout the week, and it was not until late on Saturday afternoon that John, standing in one room of the suite in the Palace Hotel charged to the name of Robert Mitchell, flung the pile of papers from his arms into the bottom of a suitcase with a swish and solid thud of satisfaction. Victory from first to last had perched upon his tawny head. He had met good men and beaten them; and he had a right to the wave of exultation that surged for a moment dizzily through his brain.

Mr. Mitchell, too, was feeling exultant and proud beyond words, as he stood in the door of John's room. His hands were deep in his pockets; his large black derby hat was pushed far back from his bulging brow. On his great landscape of a countenance was an oddly significant expression.

"Well, Jack," he began, after an interval of silence, "what about the stage?"

John started like a man surprised in a guilty act, although he had known for months that this was a question Mr. Mitchell might ask at any moment; but the decision involved seemed now so big that from day to day he had hoped the inevitable might be postponed.

"I shall be naming a new chief clerk in a couple of weeks, now that Heitmuller is to become General Agent," Mr. Mitchell went on half-musingly, and as if to forestall a hasty reply to the question he had asked. "The new man will be in line to be appointed Assistant General Freight Agent very soon, on account of the consolidations."

For a moment John saw himself as Chief Clerk, sitting in the big swivel chair at the high, roll-top desk, with all the strings of the business he knew so well how to pull lying on the table before him; with clerks, stenographers, men from other departments and that important part of the shipping public which carried its business to the general freight office, all running to him.

And from there it was only a short, easy step to the position of Assistant General Freight Agent.

Only the man who has toiled far down in the ranks of a railroad organization doing routine work at the same old desk in the same old way for half a score of years can know on what a dizzy height sits the Chief Clerk, or how far beyond that swings the lofty title of Assistant General Freight Agent.

"Your advancement would be very rapid," suggested Mr. Mitchell, flicking his flies skilfully upon the whirling eddies of the young man's thought.

John had achieved enough and glimpsed enough to see that Mitchell was right. Advancement would be rapid. Mitchell would soon go up the line himself; he could follow him. General Freight Agent, Assistant Traffic Manager, Traffic Manager, Vice-president in charge of traffic—President! with twelve thousand miles of shining steel flowing from his hand, which he might swing and whirl and crack like a whip! The prospect was dazzling in the extreme, and yet it was only for a moment that the picture kindled. In the next it was dead and sparkless as burned-out fireworks.

"You have a strong vein of traffic in your blood," the General Freight Agent began adroitly, but John broke in upon him.

"Mr. Mitchell," he said, and his utterance was grave, "I am sorry to disappoint you, but it comes too late. A year ago such a hint would have thrown me into ecstasies. To-day it leaves me cold. I have had another vision."

The face of Mitchell shaded from seriousness almost to sadness, but he was too wise to increase by argument an ardor about which, to the railroad man, there was something not easy to be understood, something, indeed, almost fanatical. Instead Mitchell asked with sober, interested friendliness:

"What is your plan, John?"

"To resign July first," John answered, for the first time definitely crossing the bridge, "to come to San Francisco and seek an engagement with some of the stock companies playing permanently here, even though I begin the search for an opening without money enough to last more than a week or two."

"Without money!" exclaimed Mr. Mitchell, in surprise.

"Yes," confessed Hampstead, flushing a little. "My salary was not very munificent, you know, and I have usually contrived to get rid of it, frequently before I got the pay check in my hands."

Mr. Mitchell's small, prudent eyes looked disfavor at a spendthrift.

"However," he suggested, "you have only yourself to think of."

"That's another point against me," confessed Hampstead. "I have some one else to look out for. My brother-in-law is an artist, you know, and he has not been very successful yet, so that I hold myself ready to help with my sister and the children if it should ever become necessary."

"That's a handicap," declared Mitchell flatly.

"I won't admit it," said John loyally. "You don't know those children. Tayna's the girl, nearly twelve now, a beauty if her nose is pugged. Such hair and eyes, and such a heart! Dick's the boy, past ten. He's had asthma always, and is about a thousand years old, some ways. But they—"

Hampstead gulped queerly.

"Those two children," he plunged on, "are dearer to me than anything in the whole wide world. You know," and his tone became still more confidential, while his eyes grew moist, "it would only be something that happened to them that would keep me from going on with my stage career."

Mitchell's respect for John was changing oddly to a fatherly feeling. He felt that he was getting acquainted with his clerk for the first time. He resolved that he would not tempt the boy, and that if it became necessary, he would help him. However, before he could express this resolve, if he had intended to express it, the telephone rang.

Hampstead answered it, stammered, faltered, replied: "I will see, sir, and call you in five minutes," hung up the 'phone and turned to confront Mitchell, with a look almost of fright upon his face.

"It's William N. Scofield," he exclaimed. "He wants me to take dinner with him at his club to-night."

A disbelieving smile appeared for a moment on the wide lips of Mitchell; then understanding broke, and his smile was swallowed up in a hearty laugh.

"He wants to offer you a position," Mitchell said, when his exultant cachinnations had ceased. "Look out that he doesn't win you. Scofield is a very persuasive man. He nearly got me once. Besides, he has more to offer you than I have."

Hampstead pressed his hand to his brow. Under his tawny thatch ideas were in a whirl.

"What shall I do?" he asked rather helplessly.

"Stay over," commanded Mitchell unhesitatingly. "Ring up and tell him you'll be there."

"But there's no use, anyway," replied John suddenly, getting back to the main point. "My mind's made up."

"No man's mind is made up when he's going to take dinner on the proposition with William N. Scofield," answered Mitchell oracularly.

"And you?" asked Hampstead, suddenly aware how good a man at heart was Robert Mitchell, and quite unaware that he had seized that gentleman's pudgy right hand and was wringing it in a manner most embarrassing to Mitchell himself. "You—"

But the telephone was tingling impatiently.

"Mr. Scofield wants to know," began a voice.

"Yes, yes, I'll be happy to," interrupted John, not knowing just what tone or form one should take in expressing the necessary amenities to the secretary of a great man.

"Very well. His car will call for you at six-thirty," responded the voice.

But before John could pick up the thread of his unfinished sentence to Mr. Mitchell, a knock sounded at the door, at first soft and cushioned, as if from a gloved hand, then louder and more determined, and repeated with quick impatience.

"Come in," called Mitchell.

The knob turned, and the door swung wide, leaving the panel of white to frame the picture of a woman. She was young, of medium height and appealing roundness, clad from head to foot in a traveling dress of dark green, with a small hat of a shade to match, the chief adornment of which was a red hawk's feather slanting backward at a jaunty angle. A veil enveloped both hat brim and face but was not thick enough to dim the sparkle of bright eyes or the pink flush of dimpled cheeks, much less to conceal two rows of gleaming teeth from between which, after a moment's pause for sensation, burst a ringing cadence of laughter.

"Miss Bessie!" exclaimed John excitedly.

"The very first guess!" declared that young lady, advancing and yielding the doorframe to another figure which filled it so much more completely as to sufficiently explain a more deliberate arrival.

"Mollie!" ejaculated Mitchell, who by this time had turned toward the door. "What in thunder?"

But the General Freight Agent's lines of communication were just then temporarily disconnected by an assault upon his features conducted by Miss Bessie in person. During this interval, Mrs. Mitchell stood placidly surveying the room, and as she took in its air of preparation for immediate departure, a tantalizing smile spread itself on her expansive features.

"Is this an accident or a calamity?" demanded Mitchell, playfully thrusting Bessie aside and advancing to greet his wife.

"Both!" declared that lady, submitting her lips with more of formality than enthusiasm, after which, feeling that sufficient time had elapsed to make an explanation of her sudden appearance not undignified, she proceeded:

"Just one of my whims, Bob! Next week was the spring vacation; no school, and the poor child was pale from overstudy and so anxious about her examinations (Bessie shot a look at Hampstead), that I just made up my mind I'd bring her up here and let her get a good bite of fog and a breath from the Golden Gate."

"Fine idea!" declared Mitchell. "Fine! Now that you've had it," he chuckled, "we'll start home. I'm leaving at eight."

"You are not!" proclaimed Mrs. Mitchell flatly. "You will stay right here for at least three days and do nothing but devote yourself to your child. And to her mother!" she subjoined, as if that were an afterthought; all with a toss of her chin, which, by way of emphasis, held its advanced position for a moment after the speech was done.

"And the business of the company?" Mitchell suggested, with a solicitous air.

"It can wait on me," averred Mrs. Mitchell decisively, taking a turn up and down the room and surveying once more the signs of confusion and of hasty packing. "Many's the time I've waited on it. You can stay, too, John," she said, turning to Hampstead. "I want you to take Bessie to a lot of places Robert and I have been and won't care to visit this time."

"Robert!" and while her eyes turned toward the windows, two of which opened on a view of Market Street, the new commander began a redisposition of forces, "I rather like this suite. Bessie and I will take the corner room. You can take this room and Mr. Hampstead can move across the hall, or anywhere else they can put him."

As an act of possession, Mrs. Mitchell walked to the dresser, took off her hat, stabbed the two pins into it emphatically, and tossed it upon the bed, where it bloomed like a flower-garden in the midst of a desert of papers while she, still standing before the mirror, bestowed a few comfortable pats upon her hair.

"John," Mitchell said jovially, "I know orders from headquarters when I get 'em. You were going to stay over, anyway; but use your own judgment about obeying the instructions you have just received."

"Never had such agreeable instructions in my life," declared Hampstead, turning to Mrs. Mitchell with an elaborately stagy bow, and the natural quotation from Hamlet which leaped to his lips:

"'I shall in all my best obey you, madam.'"

"See that you do," said that lady, not half liking the bow and shooting a glance at Hampstead less cordial than austere. "And by the way," she added, "see that you don't let that stage nonsense carry you much further, young man," with which remark Mrs. Mitchell turned abruptly and gave Hampstead a most complete view of a broad and uncompromising back.

In Mrs. Mitchell's mind a man had much better be a section hand on the Great Southwestern than a fixed star on the drama's milky way.

"By the way, mother," remarked Mr. Mitchell, with the air of one who makes an important revelation, "John is just going out to dine with William N. Scofield."

Mrs. Mitchell turned quickly, and her dark eyes shot a meaningful glance at her husband, while the line of her lower lip first grew full and then protruded. A squeeze of that lip at the moment, Hampstead reflected, would extract something at least as sour as very sour lemon juice.

"Scofield is after him," bragged Mitchell.

"Well, see that he doesn't get him," his wife commanded sternly, and then shifting her somber glance until it rested on John with a look that was near to menace, inquired acridly:

"Young man, you wouldn't be disloyal? You wouldn't sell yourself?" In the second interrogatory her voice had passed from acridity to bitterness, while the eyes bored implacably, till Hampstead at first wriggled, then grew resentful and replied crisply, standing very straight:

"No, Mrs. Mitchell, I would not sell myself!"

"That's right," exclaimed Bessie, stepping impulsively toward John's side. "Do not let her browbeat you. I am sorry to say, Mr. Hampstead, that mother is inclined to be somewhat dictatorial. You see what she does to poor papa!"

"And you see what you do to poor me," exclaimed that worthy lady, turning on her daughter with surprise and injury in her glance and tone,—"dragging me almost out of bed last night to make this foolish trip up here with you. Next week, of all weeks, too, when I wanted to do so many other things."

"Ho! ho!" broke in Mitchell, "so that's the way of it. This trip up here is a scheme of yours," and he turned accusingly upon his daughter, but Bessie smiled and curtseyed, entirely unabashed. "Well, then, I don't guess we'll stay," teased Mitchell. "And I don't suppose you knew a thing about Hampstead's being here. That was all an accident."

"It was not," flashed Bessie. "I did. I haven't seen dear old John for a year. I could go in and have delightful tête-à-têtes with him when he was a stenographer, but out in the Rate Department there are forty prying eyes and men with ears as long as jack-rabbits. He hasn't taken me to a circus or anything for nobody knows how long. You shall give him money for theater tickets, for dinners, for auto rides, for everything nice for three whole days."

Bessie was standing directly in front of her father, her eyes looking up into his, and her two hands patting his generous jowls, as her speech was concluded.

John listened rapturously. This was the old Bessie talking. She had entered the room looking a year older, a year prettier since that day when he wrote the Phroso invitations for her, and had taken on so easily the lacquer and dignity of dresses and of years that he was beginning to feel in awe of her. This speech was a great relief.

Besides, in the whirl of the hour before she came, he had found himself strangely wanting to take counsel with Bessie. The Mitchells had made of him for all these years a convenient caretaker of their daughter. Bessie had made of him a playfellow with whom she took the same liberties as with any other of her father's possessions. This attitude on her part had created the only atmosphere in which Hampstead could have been at ease with her. It had permitted his soul to bask when she was by, but it had done no more. But now, he somehow wanted to confide in Bessie,—not to take her advice for he wasn't going to take anybody's advice; all advice was against him,—but to tell her what he was going to do, because he believed she would listen appreciatingly, if not sympathetically. He felt he needed at least the added support of a neutral mind. He had rejected Mr. Mitchell's proposal, but the glitter of it flashed occasionally. And now he was going to face the resourceful, the ingratiating, the dominating William N. Scofield, and he felt like a man who goes alone to meet his temptation on the mountain top.

CHAPTER VII

THE HIGH BID

For an hour and a half at dinner, and for another hour sunk in the depths of a great leather chair in the lounging room of the Pacific Union Club, William N. Scofield had searched the soul of Hampstead, who had not only been led to talk rapturously of his stage ambition but to reveal the metes and bounds of his interest in and knowledge upon many subjects.

"Gad, but you know a lot," ejaculated Scofield, with unfeigned amazement. "Where'd you get it all?"

"I have read a good deal," confessed John, trying to appear much more modest than in his heart he felt; for it was a part of Scofield's whim or of his campaign to flatter him enormously, and he had succeeded.

But for a time now, the Traffic Manager was silent, puffing meditatively at his cigar and staring at the ceiling through loafing rings of smoke in which, as if they were floating letters, he seemed to read the transcript of his thought,—the thought that if, beside employing this enormously able young man, he could also enlist in behalf of the railroad as an institution his capacity for fanatical devotion to an ideal, the prize was one worth bidding high for, high enough to win!

"People like you, Hampstead," Scofield broke out presently, and in his most ingratiating vein. "We all felt that down at the office. You did a difficult thing without making an enemy of one of us. Therefore what your personality can do interests me even more than what you know."

The railroad man interrupted his speech to shoot an exploratory glance from under veiling lids and went on calculatingly:

"The railroad business is going to change. Now we tell the Railroad Commission what to do. The time is coming when it will tell us what to do, and we will do it. But the public attitude toward the railroad has also got to change." Scofield's tone had taken on new emphasis.

"You would make the type of executive that could change it! The successful transportation man of the future has got to be a sort of ambassador of the railroad to the people, and the man who best serves the people tributary to his road will best serve his stockholders."

"Do you know who gave me that point?" the Traffic Manager asked, turning from the vision he was contemplating in the clouds of smoke over his head and looking sharply at Hampstead.

"Naturally not," admitted the younger man.

"Bob Mitchell," said Scofield, and paused while his thin lips coaxed persistently at the cigar which appeared to have gone out. "Bob Mitchell! And I reviled him for his sagacity, told him he was an altruistic fool. But after a while I saw he was right. Then I tried to get him for us, but I didn't succeed. He wasn't as sensible as I hope you will be. Besides, I am going to offer you more than I offered him."

More than he offered Mitchell! There was a sudden jolt somewhere in John's breast, and he wet a dry, parched lip, but did not speak.

"Yes," breathed Scofield softly, almost as if he had been interrupted. "I am going to offer you more. Hampstead!" and the voice was raised quickly, "I want you to be our General Freight Agent!"

If Scofield had leaned over and kissed him, John would not have been more surprised, nor have known less what to say.

"General Freight Agent!" he croaked hoarsely.

"Yes," affirmed the other coolly, almost icily, while he flicked the ashes from his cigar and enjoyed the sensation his proposal had produced.

"At my age?" stumbled John, still groping, but trying to see himself in the position.

"Why, yes," reassured Scofield suavely. "You tell me you're past twenty-five. Paul Morton was Assistant General Freight Agent of the Burlington at twenty-one. Look where he is to-day—in the cabinet of the President of the United States. The salary," Scofield added casually, by way of finally clinching the argument, "will be twelve thousand a year."

Hampstead's lips silently formed the words—twelve thousand! But he did not utter them. They dazed him. They rushed him headlong. They made rejection impossible. No man had a right to throw away such a fortune as that. One thousand dollars a month! He felt himself yielding, helplessly, irresistibly.

And then, suddenly as the photographer's bomb lights up every lineament of every face in the darkened room, for one single moment Hampstead saw things clearly and in their true proportions. This Schofield was not a man. He was a grinning devil, with horns and a barb on his tail. He was tempting, trapping, buying him. He would not be bought. "No, Mrs. Mitchell, I would not sell myself," he had said, not, however, meaning at all what that lady meant.

Leaning back stubbornly, his fist smiting heavy blows upon the cushioned arm of the chair, John muttered through clenched teeth:

"No! No! No—I'll never do it. No, Mr. Scofield, I cannot accept your offer. I thank you for it; but I cannot accept it. The stage is to be the place of my achievement. Why, why, Mr. Scofield, the wonderfully flattering offer you have made to me to-night has come because of the training incident to the cultivation of a stage ambition. If it can bring me so much with so little devotion, is it not reasonable to suppose that it will bring me more—very much more? I will not be so disloyal to that which has been so generous with me."

Scofield's countenance had suddenly and impressively changed. It became a mask of stone, a sphinx-like thing, the brow a knot, the nose a beak, the mouth a stitched scar. The beady gleam of the eyes from beneath drawn lids was sinister. This fanatical young fool was escaping him, and Scofield did not like any one to escape him.

But the young man refused to be swerved by frowns.

"Not to manage railroads," he declared enthusiastically, "but to mould human character is to be my life-work; to depict the virtues and the vices, the weaknesses and the strengths of life, to make men laugh and love and—forget."

Scofield's eyes twinkled, and his mouth became less a scar, but John thought this was a very fine phrase really, and he rushed along:

"Life looks like a tangle, like a mess—drudgeries, disappointments, injustices—the wrong man prospering—the wrong girl suffering! The drama composes life. It grabs out a few people and follows them, compressing into the action of two hours the eventualities of a lifetime and shortening perspectives till men can see the consequences of their acts, whether for good or for ill. The stage teaches the doctrine of the conservation of moral energy—and of immoral energy—that sustained effort, conserved effort is never cheated; it gets its goal at last."

"Say!" broke in Scofield; but John would not be denied what he felt was a final smashing generalization.

"To figure the tariff on human conduct, to grade and classify the acts of life, to quote the rates on happiness and misery in trainload lots. That's what I'm going to do," he concluded, with a glow upon his face.

But by this time a smile of cynic pity had appeared upon the face of the railroad man.

"Hampstead," he exclaimed sharply, with a mimic shudder and a shrug of relief as if he had just escaped something, "you're not an actor. You're a preacher!"

John gasped.

"You're a moralist," asserted Scofield accusingly, "a puritanical, Sunday-school, twaddling moralist. I have misjudged you. I wouldn't want you around at all."

With a look akin to disgust upon his face, the railroad man made a motion with his fingers in the air as if ridding them of something sticky, and arose, not abruptly but decisively, making clear that the interview had proved disappointingly unprofitable and was therefore at an end.

John also arose, bewildered by the sudden change in Scofield's attitude—a change which he resented, and also the ground of it. He a preacher? The idea was ridiculous.

Besides, it makes an astonishing difference when one has been stubbornly refusing an offer to have the offer coolly and decisively withdrawn. Something subtly psychological made him want the offer back. The door of opportunity had been closed behind him with a snap so vicious that he wanted to turn and kick it open.

But the thin, talon-like hand of Scofield was hooking the young man's rather flaccid palm for a moment.

"Remember what I tell you," he barked out in parting. "You're not an actor. You're not a railroad man. You're a preacher!"

The last word was flung bitingly, like an epithet.

John, feeling uncomfortable, walked out and along one side of Union Square, casting a momentary wondering eye on the stabbing, twin towers of the Hotel St. Francis, many windowed and many-lighted; then turned on down Geary into Market and along that wide and cobbled thoroughfare to the doors of the old Palace Hotel. By the time he was in bed, he realized that Scofield had shaken him terribly. His decision was all to make over again.

However, Bessie would be there for three days to help him, and with this thought he felt comforted.

* * * * *

"It's been a great three days," sighed John, on the following Tuesday. Bessie also sighed.

They had clambered down from the parapet below the Cliff House and sat watching the seals at play upon the rocks a stone's throw out from beneath their feet. Their position marked the southern portal of the famous Golden Gate, through which a mile-wide stream of liquid blue was running. Across the Gate rose the sheer gray cliffs of Marin County and beyond those the rugged greens and blues of the mountains, spiked in the center by the peak of Tamalpais.

Before their faces, the ocean, in swells and scoops of ever grayer gray, ran out to catch the horizon as it fell, illumined in its lower reaches by the sun, which was sinking into the haze above the waters like a lustrous orange ball.

Southward, beyond the green head of Golden Gate Park, the yellow gray of the sand dunes and the blue gray of the sea met in a lingering, playful kiss that swept back and forth in a long shimmering line which ran on sinuously, growing fainter and fainter, till lost in the shadow of the distant cliffs.

The hour was five o'clock. At eight that night John was to leave for Los Angeles. His vacation—the only vacation of his hard-driven life—was to end, and an epoch in his existence was also nearing its end. The past was clear as the land behind him; the future was an area of tossing uncertainty. Nothing appeared,—no track, no wake, no sail, no sun even. Only far over, beyond the curve of the horizon, was a kind of strange, unearthly glow, and on this his eye was set.

For three days his soul had ebbed and flowed like that lip of foam upon the beach, now stealing far up on the land,—for him the backward track; now turning and running far out to sea,—for him the way of adventure and advance.

But now the ultimate decision was to be made. Bessie saw it rising like a tide upon that face which once had seemed not to fit, a rapt look which snuggled in the hills and hollows and then began to harden like setting concrete. No one would call that face homely now. Interesting, most likely, would have been the word.

The gray eyes burned brighter, the lips grew tighter. The chin advanced, moved out to sea a little, as it were.

"Follow your star, John," Bessie declared stoutly, though a look of pain momentarily touched her whitening lips. "I shall despise you if you do not."

"The decision is made," John replied solemnly, "and you, Bessie, have helped to make it."

Bessie did not reply; she only looked.

Silence fell between them. Silence, too, was in the heavens; the sun, the waves, the restless wind for the moment appeared to stand still. All nature had paused respectfully. A man, young, inexperienced, but potential, had cast the horoscope of life beyond the power of gods or men to intervene,—and with it had cast some other horoscopes as well.

Hampstead felt the spell his act of will had wrapped about them, but he felt also the substance of his resolution framing like granite in his soul and making him strong with a new kind of strength.

But soon the sun was descending again, the clouds were drifting once more, and a gust of wind nipped sharply, causing the skirts of John's overcoat to flap lustily. Bessie twitched her fur collar closer about the neck, and thrust both hands deep into the pockets of her gray ulster. Hampstead passed his own hand through the curve of the girl's elbow, gripped her forearm possessively, selfishly, absently, and drew her toward him.

Indeed Bessie was closer to him than she had ever been before; and yet she had never felt so far away.

"Oh, but it's great to have a woman by you in a crisis," John chuckled happily.

Bessie looked up startled. John had called her woman. But she recovered from the start,—he had also called her a woman.

"Come to understand each other pretty well, haven't we?" John observed, still looking oceanward, but giving the arm of Bessie what was intended for a meaningful squeeze.

"Not at all," sighed Bessie, also still looking oceanward.

Hampstead, his thoughts bowling rapidly forward, continued motionless until a white-winged, curious-eyed gull sailed between his line of vision and the water. Then, as if abruptly conscious that Bessie's answer was not what it should have been, he turned, and at the same time boldly swung her body round till they stood facing each other. Bessie met this gaze unblinkingly for a moment, with her face set and sober; then something in John's mystified glance touched her keen sense of humor, and she laughed,—her old, roguish laugh,—and flirted the stupid in the face with the end of her boa.

"You great big egoist!" she smiled. "There, that's the first chance I've had to use that word. I only learned the difference between it and another last week."

"Indeed!" retorted Hampstead. "And when did you learn the difference between me and the other word?"

"Well, I'm not sure that there is a difference," she sparred. "Being polite, I just concede it."

"Oh," he chuckled. "But," and he was serious again, "you say we don't understand each other?"

"Nonsense; I was only joking. I do understand you; you great, big, egoistical egotist! You are just now absolutely self-centered—and all, all ambition! And I am secretly—secretly, you understand—proud of you!"

"And you," said Hampstead, drawing her close again, "are just the truest, most understanding friend a man ever, ever had. You know, Bessie, a fellow can talk to you just like a sister,—a pretty little sister!" he subjoined, when Bessie looked less pleased than he thought she should.

"You've changed a lot, too, in a year," he conceded, studying her face critically. "When you came into the hotel that night, you struck fear into my heart, and then kind of made it flutter. I said to myself, 'She's gone—the old Bessie, that could be played with. But here's a young woman, a handsome young woman, taking her place.'"

"Did you say that?" asked Bessie happily.

"An exceedingly beautiful woman," went on John, as if stimulated by the interruption. "By George, a very corker of a woman—look at those eyes, those lips, those dimples. Same old dimples, girl!" he laughed emotionally. "And I said, 'Now, here's a woman, a ripe, wonderful woman, to be made love to—'"

"John!"

There was in Bessie's sudden exclamation the surcharged sense of all the proprieties which their relationship involved.

"Oh, don't be alarmed," exclaimed Hampstead, suddenly very earnest and respectful. "I am not leading up to anything. I do not misunderstand the nature of your goodness to me. I am not presuming anything. I am only telling you what I said to myself."

"Oh," murmured Bessie noncommittally, though she shivered for a moment as if a gust of wind had come again. Hampstead, feeling this, drew her still closer and hunched his broad shoulder to shelter her more, as he explained further:

"But it was I, you know, and there was nothing for me to do but to fly. I was for jumping out the window. And then you suddenly made that wonderful speech about going to the circus with dear old John, and your mother let it out that you wanted me to run around with you here, and I saw that toward me you were the same old Bessie; that for a few days we could be once more just friendly, only two finer friends, because we're both grown up now."

"Yes," Bessie sighed, almost contentedly. "I did want you, John. A girl gets tired of society, of clubs and dances and things, even in High. You know, I get weary of the sight of these slim, pompadoured boys sometimes. I just wanted somehow to feel the arm of a real man, to hear him talk, even if he does nothing but talk about himself, and until this minute in three days has not confessed that I have dimples, and—and a heart."

"Slow, about some things, am I not?" confessed John. "Awfully, awfully slow!"

"I will agree with you," said Bessie, with a mournfulness that literally compelled him to perceive that she was some way disappointed in him.

"But," he inquired reproachfully, "aside from my usefulness as a social escort and a sort of masculine tonic, you do admire me a little, don't you?"

"Oh, yes," she answered frankly. "I admire you a lot."

"But you're disappointed about something?"

"Apprehension is the better word," she confessed soberly.

"Apprehension? Of what?" John was looking at her almost accusingly. Bessie avoided his glance. She could not tell him what she feared nor why she feared it.

"You think I'll fail?" John demanded.

"No," disclaimed Bessie seriously. "I think you will succeed!"

"You think so?" and Hampstead's face lighted brilliantly. "Oh, God bless you for that!" and again he shook her, this time tenderly and drew her closer till her breast was touching his, and she leaned her head far back to look up into his face.

"Yes," she breathed softly, "I think so!"

"And you do not think me silly for turning my back upon solid realities to follow my ideal?"

"No! No!" and she shook her head emphatically, "I honor you for it, John. You have inspired me, John, and thrilled me. I used to think—how good you are! Now I think—how noble you are! You have made my feeling for you one of worshipfulness almost."

The look in her face did express that, and Hampstead noticed it now.

"Ah," he murmured, pressing her arms against her sides, "you dear, impressionable little girl!"

Quite thoughtless of how unnecessarily close he was drawing Bessie, either to shelter her from the wind or for the purpose of conversation, or especially in the fulfillment of his duty to his charge as guide and protector, John was finding a pleasurable sensation in this position of intimacy, and was indeed, just upon the threshold of one very great discovery when he made another, perhaps equally surprising, but vastly less important. Looking into the upturned eyes, which after the canons of Delsarte, he was thinking expressed "devotion" perfectly, a shadow was seen to project itself downward from the upper lids across the iris, as if a storm were gathering on a placid lake. John watched the shadow curiously as it deepened, until it became clear that a mist was congealing in those swimming violet depths.

"Why, Bessie," he exclaimed, amazed, "you are going to cry!"

On the instant two tears trickled from the dark lashes and gleamed for a moment like solitaire diamonds in the setting of two ruby spots that had gathered unaccountably upon her upturned cheeks.

"You are crying," he charged straightly.

Bessie's expression never changed, but her smooth, round chin nodded a trembling and unabashed assent. A sudden impulse seized John. The position of his arms shifted.

"Bessie!" he murmured feelingly, "I am going to kiss you!"

Bessie did not appear half as surprised at this announcement as Hampstead at himself for making it.

"May I?" he persisted.

The expression of devotion in Bessie's swimming orbs remained unstartled, her pose unaltered. Only her lips moved while she breathed a single word: "Yes."

Instantly their ruby and velvet softness yielded to the pressure of John's, planted as tenderly and chastely as was his thought of her,—for that other discovery that he was on the verge of making had been fended off by the coming of the tear.

CHAPTER VIII

JOHN MAKES UP

That night, according to programme, John went back to Los Angeles; and a few weeks later, also according to programme, he was again in San Francisco, no longer a railroad man, but—in his thought—an actor.

Now calling oneself an actor and being one are quite different; but it took an experience to prove this to John. Even the opportunity for this experience was itself hard to get. It was days before he even saw a theatrical manager, weeks before he met one personally, and a month before he got his first engagement.

When he talked of the drama to actors the way he had talked of it to the Reverend Charles Thompson Campbell, they did not comprehend him; when he talked to them as he had to Scofield, they smiled cynically; when he admitted to one manager that he was without professional experience, the admission drew a sneer which froze the stream of hope in his breast.

John thereafter told no other manager this, but learned instead the value of a "front", and inserted in the professional columns of the San Francisco Dramatic Review a card which read:

+------------------+
| |
| JOHN HAMPSTEAD |
| HEAVY |
| AT LIBERTY |
| |
+------------------+

"Heavy" in theatrical parlance means the villain. Modestly confessing himself not quite equal to "leads", though in his heart John scorned to believe his own confession, he had announced himself as a "heavy."

This card appeared for three succeeding weeks, but on the fourth week there was a significant change. It read:

+-----------------------------------+
| |
| JOHN HAMPSTEAD |
| HEAVY |
| With the People's Stock Company |
| |
+-----------------------------------+

The People's Stock Company was new, a "ten-twenty-thirty" organization, got together in a day for a season of doubtful length, in a huge barn of a house that once had been the home of bucket-of-blood melodramas, but for a long time had been given over to cobwebs and prize fights. The promoters had little money. They spent most of it on new paint and gorgeous, twelve-sheet posters. Everything was cheap and gaudy, but the cheapest thing was the company—and the least gaudy.

The opening play was a blood-spiller with thrills guaranteed; the scene was laid in Cuba at a period just preceding the Spanish-American War. Hampstead's part was a Spanish colonel, Delaro by name. Delaro was no ordinary double-dyed villain. He was triple-dyed at the least, and would kick up all the deviltry in the piece from the beginning to the end; he would steal the fair Yankee maiden who had strayed ashore from her father's yacht; he would imprison her in an out-of-the-way fortress; court her, taunt her, threaten her—and then when the audience was wrought to the highest pitch of excitement and the last throb of pity for her impending fate at the hands of this fiend in yellow uniform and brass buttons, the galloping of horses would herald the appearance of Lieutenant Bangster, U.S.N., lover of the maiden and hero of the play. (The Navy on horseback!) A pitched battle would result, pistols, rifles, cannon would be fired, the fortifications would be blown away, and Old Glory go fluttering up the staff to the thundering applause of the gods of the gallery.

Delaro was an enormous opportunity; but it was also an enormous responsibility. John went into rehearsal haunted by fear that the carefully guarded secret of his inexperience would be discovered, knowing that instant humiliation and discharge would follow. He had trudged, hoped, brazened, starved, prayed to get this part. He must not lose it, and he must make good. The sweat of desperation oozed daily from his pores.

Halson, the stage manager, was a tall, tubercular person, with a husk in his throat and a cloudy eye. This eye seemed always to John to be cloudier still when turned on him. On the fourth day of rehearsal, these clouded looks broke out in lightning.

"Stop that preaching!" Halson commanded impatiently. "You are intoning those speeches like a parrot in a pulpit. Colonel Delaro is not a bishop. He is a villain—a damned, detestable, outrageous villain! Play it faster; read those speeches more naturally. My God, you must have been playing— By the way, Hampstead, what were you playing last?"

The shot was a bull's-eye. John felt himself suddenly a monstrous fraud and had a sickening sense of predestined failure. In his soul he suddenly saw the truth. Acting was not bluffing. Acting was an art! The poorest, dullest of these people, bad as they appeared to be, knew how to read their lines more naturally than he. He was not an actor. He never had been an actor. He was only a recitationist.

"What were you playing last, I say?" bullied Halson, as if suddenly suspicious.

But John had rallied. "If I don't get the experience, how will I ever become an actor," was what he said to himself.

"My last season was in Shakespeare," was what he observed to Halson, with deliberate dignity.

"Oh," exclaimed the stage manager, much relieved. "That explains it. I was beginning to think somebody had sawed off a blooming amateur on me."

John had not deemed it prudential to add that this season in Shakespeare lasted one whole evening and consisted of some slices from the Merchant of Venice presented in the parlor of the Hotel Green in Pasadena; and the scorn with which Halson had immediately pronounced the word "amateur" sent a shiver to Hampstead's marrow, while he congratulated himself on his discretion. Nevertheless, he suffered this day many interruptions and much kindergarten coaching from Halson and felt himself humiliated by certain overt glances from the cast.

"The boobs!" thought John. "The pin-heads! They don't know half as much as I do. They never taught a Y.M.C.A. class in public speaking; they never gave a lesson in elocution in all their lives, and here they are staring at me, because I have a little trouble mastering the mere mechanics of stage delivery. It's simple. I'll have it by to-morrow."

But at the end of the rehearsal, John felt weak. Instead of leaving the theater, he slipped behind a curtain into one of the boxes and sank down in the gloom to be alone and think. But he was not so much alone as he thought. A voice came up out of the shadows in the orchestra circle. It was the voice of Neumeyer, the 'angel' of the enterprise, who was even more inexperienced in things dramatic than his "heavy" man.

"How do you think it'll go?" Neumeyer had asked anxiously.

"Oh, it'll go all right," barked the whiskey-throat of Halson. "It'll go. All that's worrying me is this blamed fool Hampstead. How in time I sawed him off on myself is more than I can tell. However, I've engaged a new heavy for next week."

John groped dumbly out into the day. But in the sunshine his spirits rallied. "They can't take this part away from me," he exulted and then croaked resolutely: "I'll show 'em; I'll show 'em yet. They're bound to like me when they see my finished work."

And that was what he kept saying to himself up to the very night of the first performance. But that significant occasion brought him face to face with another problem,—his make-up.

The matter of costume was simple. It had been rented for a week from Goldstein's. It was fearsomely contrived. The trousers were red. Varnished oilcloth leggings, made to slip on over his shoes, were relied upon to give the effect of top boots. The coat was of yellow, with spiked tails, with huge, leaf-like chevrons, with rows of large, superfluous buttons, and coils on coils of cord of gold.

But make-up could not be hired from a costumer and put on like a mask. It was a matter of experience, of individuality, and of skill upon the part of the actor. All John knew of make-up he had read in the books and learned from those experimental daubs in which his features had been presented in his own barn-storming productions. The make-up of Ursus had been almost entirely a matter of excess of hair, acquired by a beard and a wig rented for the occasion. This, therefore, was really to be his first professional make-up, and Hampstead was blissfully determined that it should be a stunning achievement.

In order that he might have plenty of time for experiment, the heavy man entered the dressing rooms at six o'clock, almost an hour and a half before any other actor felt it necessary to appear, and went gravely about his important task.

First treating the pores of his face to a filling of cold cream,—all the books agreed in this,—John chose a dark flesh color from among his grease paints and proceeded to give himself a swarthy Spanish complexion. Judging that this swarthiness was too somber, he proceeded next to mollify it by the over-laying of a lighter flesh tint; but later, in an effort to redden the cheeks, he got on too much color and was under the necessity of darkening it again. Thus alternately lightening and darkening, experimenting and re-experimenting, seven o'clock found him with a layer of grease paint, somewhere about an eighth of an inch thick masking his features into almost complete immobility.

Next he turned attention to the eyes, blackening the lashes and edging the lids themselves with heavy mourning. At the outer corners of the eyes he put on a smear of white to drive the eye in toward the nose; between the corner of the eye and the nose, he was careful to deepen the shadow. This was to make his eyes appear close together. Down the bridge of the nose he drew a straight white stripe to make that organ high and thin and narrow; while in the corner between the cheek and nostril went another smear of white, to drive the nose up still higher and sharper.

In the midst of this artistry, Jarvis Parks, the character man, who had been assigned to dress with Hampstead, entered.

"Hello," said John, with an attempt at unconcern.

"Hard at it," commented Parks, and began with the ease of long practice to arrange his make-up materials about him, after which deftly, and almost without looking at what he was doing, he transformed himself into a youthful, rosy-cheeked, navy chaplain.

"Half hour!" sang the voice of the call boy from below stairs.

John was busy now adjusting a pirate moustache to his upper lip by means of liberal swabbings of spirit gum. As he worked, he hummed a little tune just to show Parks how much at ease and with what satisfied indifference he performed the feat of transposing his fair Saxon features into the cruel scowls of a villainous Spanish colonel.

But catching the eye of Parks upon him for a moment, Hampstead was puzzled by the expression, although he reflected that it was probably admiration, since he certainly had got on ever so much better than he expected. It surely was a fine make-up—a brilliant make-up.

"Fifteen minutes," sang the voice of the call boy.

Hampstead could really contain his self-complacency no longer.

"Well," he exclaimed, turning squarely on Parks, "what do you think of it?"

Now if John had only known, he disclosed his whole amateurish soul to wise old Parks in that single question, for a professional actor never asks another professional what he thinks of his make-up.

"Great!" responded Parks drily, but again there was that look upon his face which Hampstead could not quite interpret.

"Five minutes!" was bellowed up the stairway.

Hampstead drew on his coat of brilliant yellow, buckled on his sword, and had opportunity to survey himself again in the glass and bestow a few more touches to the face before the word "overture", the call boy's final scream of exultation, echoed through the dressing rooms.

The corridor outside John's door was immediately filled with the sound of trampling feet, of voices male and female, some talking excitedly, some laughing nervously, every soul aquiver with that brooding sense of the ominous which sheds itself over the spirits of a theatrical company upon a first night.

Parks, with a final touch to his hair and a sidewise squint at himself, turned and went out. The footsteps and voices in the corridor grew fainter and then came trailing back from the stairway like a chatterbox recessional.

It was quiet in the dressing rooms, except for a droning from across the way, and John knew what that was; for the sweet little ingenue had told him in a moment of confidence: "On first nights I always go down on my knees before I leave my dressing room." There she was now, telling her beads.

"Shall I pray, too?" he asked, and then answered resolutely, "No! Let's wait and see what God'll do to me."

His throat was arid. His lips, from the drying spirit gum and the excess of grease paint, were stiff and unresponsive.

"Eternal Hammering is the Price of Success" he muttered thickly, trying to brace himself. "Now for a great big swing with the hammer." But his spirits sagged unaccountably, and he turned out into the corridor as if for a death march.

At this moment the area between the foot of the stairs and the wings of the stage was a weaving mass of idling scene-shifters, hurrying, nervous, property men, and a horde of supernumeraries made up as American sailors, Spanish soldiers, and Cuban natives. All was movement and confusion.

The principals had drifted to their entrances and taken position in the order in which they would appear; but they too were restless; nobody stood quite still; at every movement, at every loud word, everybody turned or looked or started. The hoarse voice of Halson and his assistant, Page, repeatedly resounded.

As Hampstead descended the stairs upon this strange, moving picture, it appeared to him to organize into a ferocious, misshapen monster that meant him harm; or a python coiling and uncoiling its gigantic, menacing folds. The thing was argus-eyed, too, and every eye stabbed him like a lance.

Emerging upon the floor, John paused uncertainly before this hostile wall of prying scrutiny. Somebody snickered. A woman's voice groaned "My Gawd!" and followed it with a hysterical giggle.

Could it be that they were laughing at him? John felt that this was possible; but he stoutly assured himself that it was not probable.

However, just as his features passed under the rays of a bunch light standing where it was to illumine with the rays of the afternoon sun the watery perspective of a jungle scene, he came face to face with the stage manager. Halson darted one quick glance, and then a look of horror congealed upon his face.

"In the name of God!" he hissed huskily. "Hampstead, what have you been doing to yourself?"

"Doing to myself?" exclaimed John, trying for one final minute to fend off fate. "Why? What do you mean?"

Halson's voice floated up in a half humorous wail of despair, as he rolled his eyes sickly toward the flies.

"What do I mean?" he whined. "The man comes down here with his face daubed up like an Esquimaux totem pole, and he asks me what do I mean?"

But Halson was interrupted by a sudden silence from the front. The orchestra had stopped. The curtain was about to rise.

"Page! Page!" groaned Halson in a frantic whisper, "Hold that curtain! Signal a repeat to the orchestra! Here, you!" to the call boy. "Run for my make-up box. Quick!"

John's knees were trembling, and he felt his cheeks scalding in a sweat of humiliation beneath their blanket of lurid grease, as Halson turned again upon him with:

"You poor, miserable, God-forsaken amateur!"

Amateur! There, the word was out at last, and it was terrible. No language can express the volume of opprobrium which Halson was able to convey in it. To Hampstead it could never henceforth be anything but the most profane of epithets. As a matter of fact, he was never after able to hate any man sufficiently to justify calling him an amateur.

While the orchestra dawdled, while the company of "supers" crowded close, and the principals looked sneeringly on from all distances, Halson made up the heavy's face for the part he was to play, thereby submitting John Hampstead to the bitterest humiliation of his dramatic career.

Yet once engaged upon this work of artistry, the stage manager's wrath appeared to soften. Half cajoling and half pleading, he whined over and over again, "If you had only told me, Mr. Hampstead! If you had only told me, I would have helped you."

"If I only had told him," reflected John, beginning all at once to like Halson, and never suspecting that the man in his heart was hating him like a fiend, and that his fear that the amateur would go absolutely to pieces under the strain of the night was the sole reason for soothing and encouraging and commiserating him by turns.

But now the orchestra grew still again.

"Aw-right," husked Halson, and Hampstead heard that ominous, sliding, rustling sound which to the actor is like no other in all the world.

CHAPTER IX

A DEMONSTRATION FROM THE GALLERY

Every chair in the orchestra of the People's Theater was taken; the boxes were occupied, and as for the odd rectangular horseshoe of a gallery, with its advancing arms reaching forward almost to the proscenium arch, while its rearward tiers rose and faded into distance like some vast enclosed bleachers, it seemed a solid mass of humanity. The curtain rose on critical silence. The repetition of the overture had given a hint that all was not running smoothly, and at the first spoken word a jeer came from the gallery. The actor stammered and made the foolish attempt to repeat his words, but the attempt was lost in a clamor of voices. Feet were stamped, hats were waved, peanuts and popcorn balls were thrown. The actors braced themselves and went on doggedly, but so did the balconies, and it presently appeared that something like a demonstration was in progress. Swiftly an explanation of the great masses in the gallery and their behavior was passed from mouth to mouth behind the scenes. It said they were six hundred south-of-Market-Street hoodlums who had been hired by a rival theatrical manager to come and break up the performance. Whether this was true, or whether the outbreak in the gallery was merely the unsuppressible spirit of turbulent youth, it stormed on like a simoon, gaining in volume as it proceeded.

For a while the people down-stairs, having paid their thirty cents to witness a theatrical performance, protested; but they appeared soon to conclude that the show in the gallery was the more worth while. Ceasing to protest, they began to applaud the trouble-makers and even to abet them.

Behind the scenes panic reigned. The actors at their exits bounded off, panting in terror, as if pelted by bullets. Those whose cues for entrance came, snatched at them excitedly, and like gladiators rushing into the arena, plunged desperately upon the stage. The face of the leading lady was white beneath her make-up as she almost tottered upon the scene. Some instinct of chivalry led the mob to desist for a minute while she delivered her opening lines. But the demonstration broke out afresh as the leading man entered, though he wore the uniform of a lieutenant in the navy. His every speech was jeered. The excitement grew wilder; not a word spoken upon the stage was heard, even by the leader of the orchestra.

"My God, what they will do to you, Hampstead!" exclaimed Halson fiercely, as a detachment in the gallery began to march up and down the aisle, the rhythm of their heavy steps making the old house shiver like a ship in a storm.

Yet of all the actors trembling behind the scenes, it is possible that Hampstead was the very coolest. He had been the most perturbed, the most distraught; but this counter-disturbance made his own distressing situation forgotten. No eyes were riveted on him now. No thoughts were on him and the terrible humiliation he had publicly endured or the wretched failure he was going to make. The best, the most experienced, were in the most complete distress—clear out of themselves. The leading man had become angry, had lost his lines, and did not know what he was saying.

"Stanley's lost; he's ad-libbing to beat the band," John heard Page remark.

Ad-libbing! It was a new word. In the midst of all this confusion, John took note of it and next day learned of Parks that it was a stage-participle made from ad libitum. An actor ad-libbing was an actor talking on and on to fill space in some kind of a stage wait or because, as with Stanley, he had forgotten his lines.

Neumeyer, the "angel", came in from the front and added his white, agitated face to the awed groups standing about the wings.

"They've lost half the first act," he groaned, through chattering teeth. "Even when they wear 'emselves out, the piece is ruined because the people down-stairs have missed the key to the plot."

"Your cue is coming," bawled Page to John.

"Don't worry, though," croaked Halson in Hampstead's ear, still fearful that his man would collapse. "The piece is going so rotten you can't make it any worse. Cut in!"

But to his surprise, Hampstead's eye glinted with the light of battle.

"Worry?" he exclaimed excitedly. "Watch me. I'm going to get 'em!"

Halson gazed in pure pity.

"Get 'em," he gutturaled. "You poor, God-forsaken amateur!"

But the cue had come. Colonel Delaro, his sword clattering, his buttons flashing, his tall figure aglow with color, leaped through the entrance and took the center of the stage—so clumsily that he trod on Stanley's favorite corn and hooked a spur in the mantilla trailing from the arm of Miss Constance Beverly, the mislaid daughter of a millionaire yachtsman; but nevertheless, Hampstead was on. He had seized the center of the stage and he filled it full, as with an ostentatious gesture, he swept off his gold lace cap before Miss Beverly.

"What star's this?" shrieked a voice on one side the gallery.

"No star at all. It's a comet!" bawled a man from the other side, cupping his hands to carry his second-hand wit around the auditorium.

The Spanish War was not then so far back in memory that the sight of the uniform did not speedily kindle a little popular wrath upon its own account, and the demonstration began again and rose higher, but Hampstead became neither flustered nor angry. He maintained his character and his dignity. He remembered his speeches, and delivered them in stentorian tones that sounded vibrantly above the general clamor. When the gallery discovered to its surprise that here was a voice it could not entirely drown, it stopped out of sheer curiosity to see what the voice was like and found it as attractive as it was forceful. Moreover, there was a kind of special appeal in it. It was the voice of a real man; if they had only known it,—of a man at bay. He was not Colonel Delaro, plotting against the liberty and affections of a lady. He was John Hampstead, fighting,—with his back to the wall,—fighting for his opportunity, for an accredited position in this poor, cheap misfit company,—a position which seemed to him just now the most desired thing in all the world. Furthermore, he was fighting to justify his own faith in himself and the faith of Dick and Tayna; yes, and the faith of Bessie.

Hampstead was, moreover, used to rough houses. He had faced them more than once on his own barn-storming one-night appearances.

The way to get an audience like this he knew was to play it like a fish, to get the first nibble of interest and then hold it motionless with the lure of some kind of dramatic story. The situation called for a skilled, dramatic raconteur, and in truth that was what Hampstead was,—not an actor but a recitationist. Also his talks in church circles had given him skill in extemporaneous speaking. It happened that his speeches in this first act completed the introduction of the plot, but they were meaningless without a clear knowledge of what already had been said. Now Hampstead began, at first instinctively and then deliberately, as he played, to gather up these lost lines of half a dozen actors and weave them into his own. The fever of composition seized him. He used the people on the stage like puppets. He made them help him re-lay the plot while he struggled to grasp the attention of the mass child-mind out there in front and enthrall it with a story.

No better way could have been devised of making Hampstead overcome his terrible faults of action and delivery. With marvelous intensity came more repose. His eyes had been changed by the deft hand of Halson till they no longer looked like holes in a blanket; and he shot out his speeches, never once in that rhythmic, preaching tone, but rapidly, jerkily, plausible or menacing by turns, but all the while convincingly.

Within a few minutes the audience was captured. It lost its enthusiasm for riot and sat silent, following first the story as Hampstead had retold it and then the action which thereafter began to unfold. It was the sheer strength of the personality of the man which made this possible. In his strength, too, the other players took courage; and soon the action was tightly keyed and moving forward to a better conclusion of the act than any rehearsal had ever promised.

At the fall of the curtain, an avalanche leaped upon Hampstead, an avalanche which consisted solely of Halson. He seemed to have a thousand hands. He was slapping John on the back with all of them, in fierce, congratulatory blows.

"Man!" he exclaimed. "Man! You saved it! You saved it!"

Neumeyer was capering about deliriously, while tears of joy were trickling from his eyes. Others crowded round: Stanley, who had the lead, amiable old Parks, Lindsay, Bordwell, Miss Harlan, and the rest.

The audience, too, was excitedly expressing itself with hand-clappings and foot-stampings.

"Scatter!" bawled Page.

The stage swiftly cleared of people as the curtain began to rise.

"Miss Harlan!" Page was shouting. "Mr. Stanley! Mr. Hampstead!"

In the order named, the three emerged and took their calls, but the heartiest applause was for the big man in yellow and red, who, quite ignoring the orchestra circle, showed all his teeth in a cordial and understanding grin to the galleries, which thereupon broke out in that hurricane of hisses which is the heavy's hoped-for tribute.

Throughout the remainder of the performance, the yellow and scarlet figure of Delaro, with his great, sweeping gestures and his vast, bellowing voice, moved, a unique and dominating figure; no doubt the first and last time in which a villain who as a character was without one redeeming quality was made the hero of the gallery gods.

With the final fall of the curtain, Hampstead climbed to his dressing room, tired but gloriously happy. All the company knew his shame, the shame of being an amateur; but all, too, knew his power, the power of a man who could rise to emergency, who had commanding presence and constructive force.

The dressing rooms were mere partitions open at the top, so that everybody could hear what everybody else was saying, or could have heard, if only they had stopped to listen. But apparently nobody listened. The strain was over, and everybody talked as if the joy were in the talking and not in being heard. Yet after the first few minutes of excited blowing-off of steam, there came a lull, as if all had stopped for breath at once.

Into this lull, Dick Bordwell, the juvenile man, as he wiped the grease paint from his face, lifted his fine tenor voice in the first half of a queer antiphonal chant, by inquiring loudly above his four wooden walls toward the common ceiling over all:

"Who is the greatest leading woman on the American stage?"

"Louise Harlan!" chanted every voice on the floor, their tones mingling merrily, as if they were playing a familiar game.

"Right-o," sang Dick, and chanted next: "Who is the greatest leading man on the American stage?"

"Billie Stanley!" chorused the voices, with shrieks of laughter.

"And who," inquired Dick, with an insinuating change in his voice, "who is the greatest juvenile man in America?"

"Rich-a-r-r-r-d Bordwell!" screamed the magpies.

"Right-o-right!" echoed Dick, with a grunt of immense satisfaction; and then he went on piping his interrogatories, as to the rest of the company, desiring to be informed who was the greatest character old man, character old lady, soubrette, light comedian and stage manager, concluding yet more loudly with:

"And who is the greatest amateur heavy on the American stage?"

As if they had been waiting for it, the voices burst out like a college yell:

"John Hampstead! John Hampstead, is the greatest amateur heavy on the American stage!"

The spirit of fun and hearty good will with which this initiation ceremony had been performed was salve to the bruised, excited soul of John. Besides an ever present sense of meanness and hypocrisy from the concealment he had practiced, John had suffered a feeling of extreme loneliness that had at no time been so great as now, when, the strain of the play over, all these children of the stage were romping joyously together. Now they had included him in the circle of their magic fellowship. True, they had used the hateful word amateur, but that was in play, and he was sure they would never use it again.

And he was right—from that hour some of them who liked him showed it; some who disliked him showed that; some merely revealed themselves as cool toward him or appeared ill at ease in his presence; but never one of them, by word or act, failed from that moment to recognize his standing as a man entitled to all the free masonry of their unique and fascinating profession.

But the climax of this climactic night for John was reached when, descending the stairway, Halson honored him with an astounding confidence.

"Marien Dounay joins the People's to-morrow," he whispered excitedly.

"Fact!" he affirmed in response to John's look of sheer incredulity. "She's a spitfire and a genius. She can do what she likes. She's quarreled with Mowrey. She's coming here to spite him. Pie for us while it lasts, huh? She opens as Isabel in East Lynne."

John knew that Mowrey had come up from Los Angeles and was just opening a long season at the Grand Opera House; but Marien Dounay—almost a star!—in that thread-bare play, East Lynne, in this out-at-elbows company, and in this old barn of a house! Impossible!

This was what John was thinking, but he was too weak to give it utterance. He wanted Halson's information to be true whether it was or not. Yet in the midst of the elation which began to kindle swiftly, he remembered what Halson had said to Neumeyer on Saturday in the dark of the orchestra: that a new man had been engaged to play the heavies.

A wave of bitterness surged over him; and yet, he reflected, things must be changed. They would scarcely let him go after to-night, so he mustered courage to inquire:

"By the way, Halson, what do I play in East Lynne?"

"You play the lead," affirmed Halson, with dramatic emphasis.

"The lead?" John gulped, struggling as if a cobblestone had just been tossed into his throat.

"Sure! You'll get away with it, too," declared the stage manager with over-enthusiasm, slapping John heavily upon the back as the big man turned away quickly, utterly unwilling that any save two or three not there to look should see into his face.

It would scarcely have diminished his joy to know that he was getting the lead simply because Archibald Carlyle was such an unredeemed mollycoddle that the leading man usually chose to enact the villain, Levison.

CHAPTER X

A STAGE KISS

For the strange freak of Miss Marien Dounay in joining The People's Stock Company, the papers found ready explanation in artistic temperament. The brilliant young actress, so the story ran, taking umbrage because Miss Elsie McCloskey, twin star of the Mowrey cast, was chosen to play a part for which Miss Dounay deemed herself specially fitted, had resigned in a huff; and thereupon, to spite Mowrey, had signed with this obscure stock company playing a dozen blocks away, where it was believed her popularity would be sufficient to punish the well-known manager in his one vulnerable spot, the box-office.

But there was one person interested who did not care a rap why Marien Dounay was playing Isabel Carlyle, the wife of Archibald Carlyle at the People's Stock this week, in the time-frazzled drama of East Lynne, and that was the man to play Archibald. She was there, and that was enough for him, swimming into his ken at the first rehearsal like a vision of some glory too entrancing to belong to anything but a dream.

Had she changed much in the four months since he had held her in his arms? Not at all, unless to grow more beautiful.

Yet if that crude actor fancied himself on terms of more than bare acquaintance with this exquisite creature, his imagination presumed too far. Miss Dounay's bearing made it instantly apparent that she gave herself airs. One comprehensive glance was bestowed upon the semicircle of the company. Hampstead's portion was more and less, a look and a nod. The nod said: "I know you, puppet." The look warned: "But do not presume. Stand."

John stood, wondering. As rehearsals progressed, his wonder grew into bewilderment. Miss Dounay treated the whole company cavalierly, but she treated him disdainfully. Her feeling for the others was simply negative; for him it appeared to be positive.

As an actress, it developed that she was "up" in the part of Isabel, having played it many times. She had, moreover, ideas of how every other part should be played and was pleased to express them. Nobody protested, Halson least of all. She was a "find" for the People's. As a director, too, Miss Dounay was masterful. A languid glance, a single word, a very slight intonation, had more force than one of Halson's ranting commands. And she was instinctively competent.

Hampstead, despite his own sad experience, watched her open-mouthed. This young woman, it appeared, was an intellectual force as well as a magnetic one. She cut speeches or interpolated them, altered business, and in one instance rearranged an entire scene, while in another she boldly reconstructed the conclusion of an act. The storm center round which much of this cutting, slicing, and fattening took place was Hampstead. She heckled him unmercifully about the reading of his lines, ridiculed his gestures, and badgered him to madness.

On the fourth day of this, John moped out of the theater, head down, reflecting bitterly upon the illusory character of woman, of which he knew so little,—moped so slowly that Parks overtook him on the first corner.

"This woman is a friend of yours," Parks proposed tentatively.

"I thought she was," sighed Hampstead weakly, "but she keeps cutting my speeches. By the end of the week, I won't have any part left at all."

Parks indulged a self-satisfied chuckle at the keenness of his own discernment.

"Don't you see," he explained, "she's cutting the stuff you do badly. She took away from you a situation in which you were awkward and unreal. She changed that scene around and left you with a climax in which you are positively graceful as well as forceful. You'll get a big hand in it. She studies you. I've watched her."

"Old man," blurted Hampstead, with sudden fervor, "it would make me the happiest man in the world if I thought that you were right. But you are wrong, and her badgering has begun to get on my nerves. Say!" and he interrupted himself to ask a question not yet answered to his satisfaction. "Why is she here?—with the People's, I mean?"

"You've heard the stories," answered Parks, with a shrug. "However, I doubt if it's any mere whim. She appears to me to have a cool, good reason for anything she does."

Parks turns off at Ninth Street, and John moved on down Market. "A cold good reason for what she does," he murmured. "What's the answer, I wonder, to what she does to me?"

As the days went on, John's wonder grew.

Now it is according to the method of dramatists that when a husband is to be abandoned by his wife in the second act there shall be certain tender passages between the two in the first act, and this ancient drama was no exception. There were contacts, handclasps, embraces, kisses. Through all of these at rehearsal time the two went mechanically. Miss Dounay apparently treated Hampstead with mere indifference, but actually she found a thousand little ways to show utter repugnance. After the first shock, John's combative instinct and his pride led him to face this situation, so difficult for a gentleman, unflinchingly. Taking her hands, pressing her to him, patting her cheek, playing with the wisps of hair upon her temple, he conscientiously rehearsed the part of the affectionate, doting husband. His very sincerity, it would seem, must have been a rebuke to the woman. She must have seen that his heart was stirred by an unexplained feeling toward her, and might have observed in his determined bearing under the galling fire of her man-baiting something noble.

Here, if she could only perceive it, was a man who had turned his back on at least one of the kingdoms of this world to become an actor; a man who would endure anything, suffer anything to add to his knowledge and skill in that difficult and all demanding art; which, indeed, was why he laid himself open to her polished ridicule by over-playing every scene, overemphasizing every word, over-expressing every gesture and emotion.

But she never relented, not even on the night of the first performance. Instead she became more aggressive in her antagonism, her method changing from subtle scorn to open derision.

Now among experienced actors there are a great many things which may take place upon the stage unsuspected of the audience. On this night, all through the tender exchanges of that first act, Miss Dounay seized upon intervals when her back was to the front to throw a grimace at John,—to do, or sotto voce to say, something irritating or ludicrous that would throw him out of character, or, as the profession puts it, "break him up." John steeled himself against all of this and went on playing with that dignity of earnestness which seemed to characterize all his life, until it would appear the climax of malice was reached when, as Miss Dounay hung about his neck, she laughed in the midst of one of his tenderest speeches, and whispered:

"There is a daub of smut on the end of your nose."

To John this communication was an arrow poisoned by the subtle power of suggestion. Was there smut upon his nose? If there were and he touched it with a finger, it would smear and ruin his make-up. If he did not remove it, the audience would observe it the first time he came down stage and laugh. On the other hand, he did not believe that there was smut upon his nose. How could it get there? In no way unless some joker had doctored the peephole in the curtain just before he peered out at the audience.

Smutted or not smutted? To touch his nose or let it alone? That was the maddening question. The puzzle and the doubt disconcerted him. His memory faltered, his tongue stumbled, and a feeling of awful helplessness came over him. He was breaking up! He was out of character! This devilish woman had succeeded. She saw it, too. John read the exultation in her eyes, and it filled him with indignation until a wave of wrath surged over his great frame like a storm. Miss Dounay saw his eyes grow suddenly stern with a light she had never noticed in them. One arm was encircling her in a caress, the other hand rested upon her shoulders. For one instant she felt this embrace tighten into a python grip that was terrifying. The man's position had not changed. To the audience it was still a mere pose, an expression of endearment.

But to Marien Dounay it was an ominous hint that this great amiable child had in him the primal elements of a brutal strength. A look of alarm shot into her face, and she whispered:

"Don't, John! Don't."

The tone of her voice was pleading. She, the proud, had cringed. She had called him John. She had surrendered.

"It was just a mean little fib," she whispered, and for a moment clung to him helplessly.

John, greatly surprised, was not too much surprised to feel the exultant surge of victory. For one moment he had lost control of himself, but in that moment he appeared to have gained control of Marien.

The strangest thing was that Miss Dounay seemed rather happy about it herself; and the wide range of the woman's capacity was revealed by her swift transition to a mood of purring contentment and a spirit of affectionate camaraderie that presently reached a surprising climax.

The act ended in the garden, with Isabel seated on a rustic bench, and Archibald bending over her. As the curtain descended, he was to stoop and print a kiss of tenderest respect upon her forehead. But now, as the curtain trembled, Miss Dounay lifted not her forehead but her lips, and held them, warm and clinging, to his for an instant that to Hampstead seemed a delicious, thrilling eternity, from which he emerged like a man newborn.

But the male instinct to gloat was the first clear thought.

"You do like me, don't you?" he breathed exultantly, while the curtain was down for an instant. Marien answered with her eyes and a quick affirmative nod, before the curtain bounded upward again for a last picture of husband and wife gazing into each other's eyes with a look expressing an infinitude of fondness. But John had ceased to be Archibald. What his look expressed was an infinitude of mystery and joy.

"And they say there is no satisfaction in a stage kiss!" he whispered to himself as he leaped up the stairs to his dressing room.

CHAPTER XI

SEED TO THE WIND

The next night Miss Dounay gave John her forehead instead of her lips to kiss, but she heckled him no more, and it was perfectly obvious to him, as to Parks, that she helped him deliberately and had been helping him all along by her stage direction.

"If you've got her interested in you, you're fixed for life," grumbled Parks wistfully. "That girl's going up the line, and she's got stuff enough to take somebody else with her."

There was a suggestion in this which John resented.

"I'm going up, too," he rejoined with the defiant exuberance of youth, "but on my own steam."

Parks looked at John up and down, and laughed,—just that and nothing more. The old man's frankness was comforting at times; at others disagreeable. John moved away irritated, and his head went up into the clouds of his dreams. But there was something in what Parks had suggested that kept coming back to his mind. True, Miss Dounay never exchanged more than the merest words of courtesy with John off the stage. But on the stage and at rehearsal it really did seem as if there was a very nice little understanding growing up between them.

Off stage John dreamed of going to call upon her. In his little room he thought of her much and hungrily. That he should think hungrily was not strange, since he was hungry. His salary was twenty dollars a week. To send half to Rose, and save money to meet his wardrobe bills, he lived on two meals a day. The morning meal, taken at half-past nine, consisted of coffee and cakes, and cost ten cents. The evening meal was taken at half-past five. It was a grand course dinner that went from soup to pie, and its cost was fifteen cents. The tip to the waitress was a smile.

When one goes supperless to bed, dreams come lightly and are fantastic. John's dreams were of banqueting after the play with Marien Dounay. Greenroom gossip had it that Marien lived royally but in modest thrift; that her French maid, Julie, was also cook and housekeeper; that Marian's disposition was domestic and yet convivial. That instead of a supper down town in one of the brilliant cafés, she preferred the seclusion of her small but cozy apartment, and the triumphs of Julie at a tiny gas grill, supplemented and glorified by her own skill with the chafing dish. That there were nights when she supped alone, but others when a lady or two, or much more likely a gentleman, or mayhap two gentlemen were honored with invitations to this feast of goddesses; for tiny, efficient, ambidextrous Julie was in her way as much of an aristocrat as her mistress, and as skillful in imparting the suggestion that she was herself of some superior clay. Subject to the whims of her mistress, she, too, had whims, and made men—and women—not only respect but admire them. Rumor said that if an invitation to one of these midnight revels with toothsome food under the personal direction of this flashing beauty ever came, it was on no account to be despised, especially if a man were hungry either for beauty or for food.

John Hampstead was hungry for food, and now he began to feel hungry also for beauty. This last was really a new appetite. John, through all his struggling years, had of course his thoughts of woman as all men have, but vaguely, as something a long way off, indefinitely postponed. Yet ever since he carried Lygia in his arms, these thoughts of woman had been recurring as something nearer, more tangible, and more necessary even. As for that kiss in the garden scene of East Lynne! Well, there was something wonderfully awakening in that kiss. It was worlds different from that brotherly, sympathetic little kiss he had given Bessie yonder upon the rocks.

By the way,—why did Bessie cry? He used to wonder sometimes why she did! And why did Marien Dounay taunt him till he was angry enough to beat her,—and then kiss him?

Women were hard to understand. They seemed to do things that had no meaning; to use words not to convey but to conceal thought; and they spoke half their speeches in riddles. However, John reflected that when he had been with women more, he would know them better. And in the meantime he supplemented his professional contacts with Marien by thinking of her constantly, even to the point where his absorbing interest led him to follow her home at night after the play,—keeping always at a safe distance behind,—and to stand across the street and watch till the light went on in that third-story bay-window on Turk Street near Mason; and then still to stand, trying to interpret the meaning of shadows moving across the window for uncounted hours, till the light went out, sometimes at two and sometimes later, or until a policeman bade him move on. If any one had told John that he was falling in love with Marien Dounay, he would have indignantly rejected the idea. She held a fascinating interest for him,—that was all. Something basic in him was attracted by something basic in her, and he yielded to it wonderingly, experimentally almost, and that was all it amounted to.

But on the night that Miss Dounay completed her engagement at the People's, for her tiff with Mowrey was over in just four weeks, the opportunity came to John to submit his feelings to more searching experimentation.

It had been his custom to wait in the shadowy wings each night to see the object of his solicitous interest depart, supposing himself always to be unobserved. But on this last night Marien surprised him into nervous thrills by walking over into the shadow with the cool assurance of an autocrat, and saying:

"Come home to supper with me, John."

At the same time Miss Dounay took the big man's arm as comfortably as if the matter had been arranged the week before last, and John walked out as if on air, but hurriedly. That soft touch upon his arm made him hungry with indescribable anticipations. Moreover, he was stirred by an itching curiosity concerning the whole of the intimate personal life of Marien Dounay. Who was she? What was she? How was she?

Yet on the very threshold of the little apartment, his sense of what was conventional in the world out of which he had come halted him.

"Should I?" he asked huskily, as the door stood open. "Would it be—proper?"

"Most particularly proper, innocent!" laughed Marien. "At the theater Julie is my maid; at home she is my housekeeper, my social secretary, my companion, and chaperone."

While the light of reassurance kindled on John's face, Marien gently drew him inside.

"Behold!" she exclaimed with a stage gesture, when the door was closed behind him. "My temporary home; my balcony window overlooking the street, my alcove wherein I sleep, the kitchenette in which we cook; behind that the bath, and back of that Julie's own room. Isn't it dear?"

"Dear!" That was a woman's word. Bessie said that about her invitation paper for the Phrosos.

"Dear?" he breathed, comparing it in one swift estimating glance to his own barren cell. "It's a paradise!"

"So much more seclusion than in hotels," declared Marien, and then went on to say in that sort of tone which belongs to an air of frank and simple comradeship: "So much less expensive, too. Do you know what saves a girl in this business? Money! Ready money. And do you know what ruins her? Extravagance—debt. We are very economical, Julie and I. We have what crooks call 'fall money', laid by for any emergency. That's what you'll need to do. Save half your salary every week. There'll be weeks you don't play, weeks when you have to go to expense. You may be ill or have an accident, or your company will close unexpectedly. Save. Save your money!"

Marien uttered these bits of practical wisdom, which were to John the revelation of an unthought-of side of this exquisite young woman's character while she was conducting him toward the window.

"Sit here," she commanded. "Look straight down Turk. See the lights battling with the fog. Listen to the waning music of the night in this noisy, cobbly, clangy city. Don't turn your head till I say!"

The lights were indeed beautiful, each with its halo of mist. The clanging bells of cars, and even the horrible squeak of the wheels as they turned a curve, with the low singing of the cables that drew them, did rise up like the orchestration of some strange new motif of the night that lulled him till he was only faintly conscious of the opening and closing of doors and a rustling at the other end of the room.

"Now!" called the voice of Marien cheerily, awakening him with a sudden thrill to the realization of her presence.

She stood at the far end of the room, surveying herself in a long mirror. Her figure was draped rather than dressed in a silken, shimmering texture of black, splashed with great red conventional flowers. The garment flowed loosely at neck, sleeves, and waist, and the fabric was corrugated by a succession of narrow, vertical, unstitched pleats, which gave an illusory effect of yielding to every movement of the sinuous body and yet clinging the closer while it yielded. As John gazed, Marien belted this flowing drapery at the waist with a knot of tiny crimson cord, and then released her coils of rich dark hair so that they fell to her hips in a fluttering cascade as silky as the texture of her robe.

When she advanced to him, the shimmering, billowy movements of the gown matched the rhythmic sway of her limbs as completely as the red splashes upon it matched the color of her cheeks. She came laughing softly, and bearing in her hand a pair of tiny red and gold slippers.

A low divan ran along one side of the room, piled high with gay cushions. Near the foot of it was a Roman chair.

"Sit here," said Marien, indicating the chair; and John, as if obeying stage directions, complied, while his hostess sank back luxuriously amid the cushions and by the same movement presented a slim, neatly booted foot upon the edge of the divan, so very near to the big man's hand as to embarrass him. At the same time she held up the slippers to his notice and observed with a nod toward the boot:

"As a mark of special favor."

For a moment John's face reddened, and he looked the awkwardness of his state of mind, his eyes shifting from the boot to Marien's face and back again.

Her face took on an amused smile, and the boot wiggled suggestively.

"Oh," exclaimed John, blushing with fresh confusion at his own dullness as he bent forward and began to struggle with the buttons of the boot.

"You see," he explained presently, still worrying with the combination of the first button, "you see—well, I guess I don't know women very well."

Marien laughed happily.

"Stage women!" John added, as if by an afterthought.

"Stage women," affirmed Marien loyally, "are no different from other women—only wiser." Then she tagged her speech sententiously with, "They have to be. Careful! You will tear the buttons off. And you—you are pinching me!"

"I beg your pardon," stammered John. "But there are so very many of these buttons."

After an interval during which Marien had appeared to watch his labors with amused interest, she asked, with mocking humor:

"Are you hurrying or delaying? I can't quite make out."

But John was by this time enjoying the to him novel situation, and merely chuckled happily in reply to this thrust. When the shoes were off, by a mystifying movement Marien snuggled first one stockinged foot and then the other into the gold embroidered slippers and with a sigh of contentment appeared to float among her pillows, while she contemplated with smiling attention the face of Hampstead. Presently she asked smiling:

"Are you a man or a boy, I wonder?"

Feeling himself drifting farther and farther under the personal spell of this magnetic woman, and entirely willing to be enthralled, John answered her only with his eyes.

"That's the Ursus look," she laughed softly, as if it pleased her.

A silver cigarette case was on a tabaret within reach of her hand.

"Have a cigarette!" she proposed.

John declined, a trifle embarrassed by the proffer. Miss Dounay lighted one and puffed a small halo above her head before she looked across at him again and asked quizzically:

"You do not smoke?"

"And I do not think women should," Hampstead replied, with level eyes.

"It is a horrid habit," she confessed, "but this business will drive women to do horrid things. Listen, Hampstead. It's hard for a man; you've found that out, and you're only beginning. It's harder for a woman; the despairs, the disappointments, the bitter lonelinesses,—the beasts of men one meets! But—" With a shrug of her shoulders she suddenly broke off her train of thought, and turning an inquiring glance on Hampstead asked:

"You never smoked?"

"Oh, yes," confessed John, "but I quit it. I decided it would not be good for me."

She regarded him narrowly, and asked:

"You would not do a thing which did not appear good for you?"

There was just a little accent on the "good."

"I have tried to calculate my resources," John confessed, resenting that accent.

Again Miss Dounay contemplated him in silence.

"You are a singularly calculating young man, I should say," she decreed finally. "And how long, may I ask, have you been living this calculating life?"

Marien was making a play upon his word "calculate."

"Seven years, I should say," replied John, thinking back.

"Seven years?" she mused. "Seven! And you feel that it has paid?"

"Immensely," replied John aggressively.

"By the way, how old are you, Ursus?"

This was what the old actor had asked. People were always asking John how old he was.

"Twenty-five," John answered a trifle apologetically. "I got started late. And you?"

The question was put without hesitation, as if it were the next thing to say.

"A man does not ask a woman her age in polite conversation," suggested Marien tentatively.

"He does not," replied John quickly, "if he thinks the answer is likely to be embarrassing."

Marien's face flushed with pleasure.

"Oh, hear him!" she laughed. "This heavy man is not so heavy, after all; but," she added, with another insinuating inflection, "he is always calculating." Then she went on, "You are right. The confession to you at least is not embarrassing. I am twenty-four years old, and I, too, have been living a calculating life for seven years."

"For seven years. How odd!" remarked John, rather excited at discovering even a slight parallel between himself and this brilliant creature.

"Yes," Marien replied. "I ran away from home at sixteen. I have been on the stage eight years. The first year was a careless one. The other seven have been—calculating years."

John could think of no words in which to describe the sinister significance which Marien now managed to get into her drawling utterance of that word "calculating." She made it express somehow the plotting villainies of an Iago, of a Richard the Third and a Lady Macbeth, and then overlaid the sinister note with something else, an impression of lofty abandon, of immolation, as if, in calculating her life, she had laid upon the altar all there was of herself—everything—in order to attain some supreme end.

John, staring at her, got a sudden intuitive gleam of a woman who was not only ambitious as he was ambitious, but wildly, dangerously ambitious, with a danger that was not to herself alone, but to any who stood near enough to be trampled on as she climbed upward,—dangerous to one who might love her, for example!

He got the thought clearly in his mind, too; yet only for a moment, and to be crowded out immediately by another thought, or indeed, a succession of thoughts, all induced by the picture she made amid her cushions.

How beautiful she was! How very, very beautiful! And how magnetic! How she had made the blood run in his veins when she lay upon his breast as Lygia, their hearts beating, their souls stirring together!

And now she had resigned herself for an hour to his company, had given him her confidence, was awaiting, as it seemed, his pleasure,—while the color came and went in her cheeks, while subdued lights danced in the dark pools beneath lazily drooping lashes, and the filmy gown which sheathed her body stirred with every breath as if a part of her very self.

Lying there like this, her presence ceased soon to induce thoughts and began to stimulate impulses. Hampstead longed to reach out and lay a hand upon her. She was so alluring and so, so helpless.

For weeks now he had allowed himself to dream of her as possibly the woman of his destiny,—not admitting it, but still dreaming it. Here in his presence, she suddenly ceased to be even a woman. She was just Woman; and the primal attraction of the elemental man is not for the woman. Fundamentally, it is just for woman. And here was Woman, the whole race of woman, beautiful, bewitching, compulsive.

An odor began to float in from the kitchenette, an odor that was not of coffee and cakes, nor of grease upon the top of a range in a dirty little restaurant. It was savory and fragrant, and it filled his nostrils. It reminded him of all the appetizing meals he had ever eaten. It made him hungry with all the hungers he had ever known; his brain was reeling; he was going to faint,—and with mere appetite. Yet the appetite was not for food.

With a kind of shock he recognized the nature of his appetite. The shock passed; but the hunger remained. John felt that he himself was somehow changed. He was not the Chairman of the Prayer Meeting Committee of the Christian Endeavor Society, not a Deacon of the grand old First Church. He was instead the man that the Reverend Charles Thompson Campbell feared for and prayed for. He was the man whose heavy ridged brows had indicated to the shrewd old actor a nature packed full of racial dynamite.

And Woman was fulminating the dynamite. Deliberately—or recklessly—or innocently; but none the less surely. Her lips were pliant. Her form was plastic. The smouldering light in the eyes, the lashes drooping lazily, the witchery of a dark tress which coiled upon the white soft shoulder, all combined in the appeal of physical charm. To this, Woman added the subtle, maddening witchery of silence,—breathing, watchful, waiting quiet.

This silence continued until it became oppressive, explosive even.

Would she not speak? He could not. Would she not move? He dared not.

As if in response to this frenzy of thought, the ripe lips parted in a smile that added one more lovely detail to the picture by revealing rows of pearly, even teeth, and her hand began to move toward him.

"Don't touch me—don't," he found himself pleading suddenly.

But already the hand was laid tenderly upon his own, and Hampstead returned the clasp like one who holds the poles of a battery and cannot let go.

Laughing softly, Woman drew Man gently to her, his eyes gazing fascinated into the depths of hers, his body bending weakly, nearer and nearer.

"John!" she breathed softly, "John!"

But at the first warmth of breath upon his cheek, the explosion came. He snatched her in his arms as if she had been a child, and pressed her to his heart rapturously, but violently. And then his lips found hers, vehemently, almost brutally, as if he would take revenge upon them for the passion their sight and touch had roused in him. She struggled, but he pressed her tighter and tighter, till at length she gave up, and he felt only the rhythmic pulsing of her body.

When at length he released the lips and held the face from him to gaze into it fondly, her eyes were closed, and the head fell limply over his arm with the long tresses sweeping to the floor.

In sudden compunction he placed her tenderly upon the divan.

"I have hurt you, Marien; I have hurt you. Forgive me; oh, forgive me!" he implored in tones of deep feeling.

When she remained quite motionless, he asked, foolishly, "Marien, have you fainted?"

Slowly her bosom rose with a respiration so deep and long that it seemed to stir every fold of her pleated gown and every cushion on the divan, while with the eyes still closed the face moved gently from side to side to convey the negative.

"Thank God!" he groaned, dropping to his knees beside her, where, seizing her hand, he began to press his kisses upon it.

Presently disengaging the hand, Marien lifted it, felt her way over his face and began to push back the towsled mop of hair from his brow, and to stroke it affectionately.

"I thought I had hurt you," he crooned.

"You did," she murmured.

"Oh, I am so, so sorry," he breathed, seizing her hand once more and pressing it against his heart.

"I do not think I am sorry," she sighed contentedly, and was still again, the lashes lying flat upon her cheeks, the long tresses in disarray about her head.

Lying there so white and motionless, she looked to John like a crushed flower. Her very beauty was broken. As he gazed, remorse and contrition overcoming him, her lips parted in a half smile while she whispered:

"The—the calculated life cannot always be depended upon, can it?"

Innocently spoken, the words came to John with the force of a reproach, which hurt all the more because he was sure no reproach had been meant. She had trusted him, and he had failed. His sense of guilt was already strong. At the words he leaped up and rushed toward the hat-tree upon which his hat and coat had been disposed. Yet before he could seize them and start for the door, Marien was before him, barring his way, looking pale but majestic, like a disheveled queen.

"Let me go," he said stubbornly. "I am unworthy to be here."

"Stay," she whispered, in a tone sweeter, tenderer, than he had ever heard her use before. "It is my wish. I do not," and she hesitated for a word, "I do not misunderstand you—poor, lonely, hungry man!"

"Supper, Madame!" piped the voice of Julie.

CHAPTER XII

A THING INCALCULABLE

One whole month passed before John sat again at midnight in the Roman chair with Marien vis-à-vis upon her heaped-up cushions. Many things may happen in a month. Many did in this. For John it was a month of progress in his art. Though the People's Stock Company had passed out of existence within two weeks after Marien Dounay's departure from it, John had done so well that he found no difficulty in securing an engagement as heavy man across the bay in Oakland with the Sampson Stock, the grade of which was higher and its permanency well established.

It was also a month of progress in his passion for Marien Dounay, although during all those thirty days he did not see her once. In the meantime imagination fed him. Every memory of that night and every deduction from those memories fanned the flame of his infatuation. Each in itself was slight, but they were like a thousand gossamer webs. Once spun, their combined holding power was as the strength of many cables.

Take, for instance, the environment in which he found her. It spoke gratifyingly to him of a genuinely good, modest nature to see that she shrank away from the garish theatrical hotels to this quiet nest with Julie. It revealed a true woman's instinct for domesticity not only surviving but flourishing in this vagabond life to which her profession compelled her.

And yet how unlike the life of the fine women he had known in the old First Church. It would have so shocked them,—this roving, Bohemian life that turned the night into day, the deep-sleep time from twelve to three into the leisure, happy, carefree hours that were like the sun at noon instead of the dark of midnight. How unbecoming it would have been in those coddled home-keeping women of the First Church, this reversal of life,—how immoral even! Yet to her it was natural. In her it was moral. It did pay a proper respect to those conventions which protect the character and happiness of woman. It was not prudish. It was better than prudish, it was good. Her virtue was not forced. It was hardy, indigenous, self-enveloping. Yes, this whole mode of life became her in her profession.

And the thought that he was of her profession threw him into raptures. Hers was a life into which he could enter,—had entered already, by reason of the favor she had shown him. What could that favor mean? Nothing else but love. She had given him too much, forgiven him too much in that one evening for him to question that at all.

And he loved her! Doubt on that score had vanished so many days ago that he could not remember he had ever doubted it.

That the partnership could not at first be equal, he was humiliatingly aware; but the development of his own powers would soon balance the inequality. However, it was something else that for the moment wiped out of mind the enormity of his presumption, and this was that memory of unpleasant experiences at which she had hinted. The thought of this beautiful, ambitious, devoted creature battling her way alone among selfish, brutal, designing men was maddening to him. The chivalrous impulse to be with her, to protect her, to battle for her, made him forget entirely considerations of inequality, and he prepared to offer himself boldly. If she did not invite him again soon, he meant to seek her out; but the invitation came before his processes had reached that stage.

John was impatiently prompt. His eyes leaped upon her eagerly as if to make sure she was still real, still the flesh and blood confirmation of his passion. She was,—not a doubt of it. Her eye was bright; the clasp of her hand was warm. Her personal power was never more evident, its whimsical manifestations never more varied, interesting, or captivating than now.

To John, no longer quite so hungry, for his salary was larger now, that supper was not so much a meal as a series of delightful additions to his impressions of the finer side of the character of Marien. But with the supper despatched, and his beautiful hostess again lolling in luxurious relaxation, it was her personality once more rather than her character which began to play upon him like an instrument with strings. Lazily she brooded and mused, talked and was silent, drifting from momentary vivacities to periods of depressed abstraction. Again and again John felt her eyes upon him scrutinizingly, estimatingly almost, it seemed to him. Because it was a supremely blissful experience to submit himself thus to the play of her moods, John postponed the declaration he felt impelled to make until it burst from him irresistibly, like a geyser.

"Listen!" he broke out excitedly, and began to pour out impetuously the tale of his swiftly ripened infatuation.

Marien did listen at first as if surprised, and then with a flush of pleasure that steadily deepened on her cheeks. Even when he had concluded she sat for a moment with lips half parted, eyes half closed, and an expression of enchantment upon her face as if listening to music that she wished might flow on forever.

"Do not speak!" John protested suddenly, as her expression appeared to change. "The picture is too beautiful to spoil. Let me take from your lips in silence the kiss that seals our betrothal."

But Marien held him off with sudden strength.

"Marien, I love you. I love you," he protested vehemently.

"No," Marien replied, lifting herself higher amid the pillows and speaking alertly as if she had just been given words to answer. "You do not love me. You love the thing you think I am."

John's blond brows were lifted in mute protest.

"Listen!" she exclaimed. "You compelled me to listen. Now I must compel you to listen—mad, impetuous man!" and she seemed almost resentful. "In what you have just been saying, you have written a part for me. You have given me a character. If I could play that part always, I should be what you are in love with, and you would love me always; but I cannot play it always; I can play it seldom. I play it now for an hour and then perhaps never again."

"Never again?" Hampstead gasped, something in the finality of her tone thrilling him through with a hollow, sickening note.

Her eyelids narrowed as she replied: "You forget that I, too, live the calculating life."

There was again that mysteriously sinister meaning in her utterance of the word "calculating."

"The key to my life is not love; it cannot be love," she went on. "I am not the purring kitten you have described. It angers me to have you think so. I am not a thing to love and fondle. I am a tigress tearing at one object. I am," and in the vehement force of her utterance she seemed to grow tall and terrible, "I am an ambitious woman! An unscrupulous, designing, clambering, ambitious woman!"

"But I love you, Marien," John iterated weakly.

"There is no place for love in the calculating life," she rejoined unhesitatingly. "Love is a thing incalculable." Yet as she uttered this sentence, her tone softened, and her eyes had a look of awe and hunger oddly mixed in them; but immediately the expression of resolute ambition succeeded to her features.

"When I am at the top," she proposed loftily.

"But the better part of life may be gone then," John protested bitterly. "The top! When shall we reach the top?"

"I shall reach it in a bound when my opportunity comes," Marien answered with cool assurance. "Nobody, not even myself, knows how good I am. Any night some man may sit in front who has both the judgment to see and the money to command playwrights, theaters, New York appearances to order. When they come, I shall conquer. Oh," and her eyes sparkled while she shivered with a thrill of self-gratulation, "it is wonderful to feel the great potential thing inside of you, to know that your wings are strong enough to fly and you only wait the coming of the breeze. It is dazzling, intoxicating, to think that within three months I may be a Broadway star; that within a year the whole English-speaking world may recognize that a new queen of the emotional drama and of tragedy has been crowned. Until that hour," and she lowered her voice as she checked the exaltation of her mood, "until that hour a lover would be a millstone."

"But," exulted John, "you are not at the top yet. I may arrive first!"

Marien looked him up and down and laughed, just laughed,—about the look and laugh that Parks had given him.

Hampstead's eager face flushed.

"You do not think that possible," he challenged aggressively.

"No, dear boy," replied the woman, her tone and manner swiftly sympathetic, "I know it is not possible. You do not realize how far you have to go. If you have genius, you do not show it. You have talent, temperament, intelligence, application; these may win for you, but the way will be long and the compensation uncertain. If you persist for ten, fifteen, maybe twenty years, till some of your exuberance has died, till experience has rounded you off, till you have learned from that great big compelling teacher out there in front, the audience, what is art and what is not; while you may not be accounted a great star, yet the world will recognize your craftsmanship and concede you a place of eminence upon the stage, a position well worth occupying, but one for which you will pay long years before you get it."

"But our love," John protested helplessly.

"Who said 'our love,'" Marien declaimed almost petulantly. "I have not confessed to any love."

"But—but," and John's eyes opened widely, "you would not permit—"

"I did not permit," she flashed. "You took, and I forgave because I told you I could understand. Can you not, blind man, also understand? If man is sometimes man, will not woman also sometimes be woman?"

"Did it mean—no more than that?"

John's eyes searched hers accusingly.

Her answer was to scorn to answer. She made it seem that she was dismissing him, exactly as any heartless woman might dismiss a favorite who had amused her for an hour, but whose antics and cajoleries had now begun to pall.

Dazed and dumb, Hampstead seemed to feel his way backward toward the door, where Julie came mysteriously, unsummoned, to help him on with his coat and thrust his hat into his hand. When John turned for a last look, Marien's back was turned, and though the head was bowed and the side of the face half concealed, he thought he saw a look of agony upon it.

"Marien," he murmured hoarsely, with sudden emotion. "Marien!"

But on the instant she raised her face to him, and it was the old face, wonderful and witching, beaming with a happy, cordial smile as she laid her hand in his without a sign of restraint of any sort. The very heartlessness of it completed his bewilderment. Did the woman not know that she was breaking his heart? It killed his hope; it cowed him and threw him into a sullen mood.

"Good-by, Miss Dounay," he said huskily.

Her eloquent eyes shot him a look in which reproach and tenderness mingled, while her hand pulsed quickly like a heart beating in his palm. What mood of sullenness could withstand that look? Not his. He smiled, as if a ray of sunshine played upon his face, and amended with:

"Good night, Marien."

"Good-by, John," she answered sweetly.

The door was closed behind him before John realized that with all her sweetness, she had said good-by, and the emphasis was on the "by."

At the corner the bewildered man turned and looked up. He could see the lace curtain at the window, but he could not see the pillows on the divan quivering with sobs from a soft burden that had flung itself among them when the door was closed.

CHAPTER XIII

THE SCENE PLAYED OUT

Marien Dounay loved him, but for the sake of her own ambition was trying to kill that love. This was the explanation which the sleepless, tossing hours fed again and again into John Hampstead's mind until he accepted it as the demonstrated truth.

As for himself, he could no more have killed his love for Marien than he could have killed a child. He determined deliberately to match his will against hers and break it; to see her again immediately, to meet her arguments with better arguments, her firm rejections with firmer affirmations; to melt her resolution with an appeal to her heart; in short, and by some means not now clear, to overmaster her purpose for the sake of her own happiness as well as his.

But a thought of Bessie Mitchell came crowding in. Now this was not altogether strange, since John had half-consciously cherished the notion that he would some day love Bessie, and he reflected now that she must have had a feeling of the same sort toward himself. Perhaps this was why she cried that day upon the rocks; perhaps, too, that was why he kissed her, for he was beginning now to understand some things better than he had before. Conscience demanded therefore that he write Bessie a tactful letter which, while vague and general, would yet somehow reveal the tremendous change in the drift of his affections.

Just that much, however, was going to be hard—a brutal piece of work—to merely hint that some other woman might be coming more intimately into his life than this trustful, jolly-hearted companion. But it was honest and it must, therefore, be done.

Hampstead summoned grimly all his resolution and dipped his pen in ink.

"Dear Bessie," he wrote, and then his pen stopped, and an itching sensation came into the corners of his eyes and a lump into his throat.

Presently he laid the pen down as resolutely as he had taken it up. He could not write Bessie out of his life, after all; at least not like that. Instead he wrote a letter that was a lie, or that started out to be a lie; but the surprising thing to Hampstead was that while he wrote, visioning Bessie at home in Los Angeles, rose-embowered, or walking to school beneath rows of palms, he was himself transported to Los Angeles, and the letter was not false. He was back again in the old life, and Bessie was an interesting and necessary part of it.

Yet he found he could not seal himself into the old life when he closed the flap of the envelope. The moment the letter was mailed, his mind went irresistibly back to Marien, whom it was a part of his plan to see that very day. This was possible because Mowrey rehearsals were long and somewhat painful affairs.

Hurrying from the Sampson Stock, at the end of his own rehearsal, John was able to cross the bay and reach the Grand Opera House while Mowrey's people were still wearily at work, and to make his way apparently unseen through the huge, gloomy auditorium to a box which was deep in shadow, as boxes usually are at rehearsal time.

Marien was "on", and the big fellow's heart leaped at the sound of her voice; yet presently it stood still again, for his jealous ear had detected a disquieting note in her utterance, a sort of cajoling purr which the lover recognized instantly. It was not Marien Dounay in rehearsal, nor yet in "character"; it was Marien herself when in her most ingratiating mood, and was meant neither for the rehearsal nor for the character, but for the actor who played the opposing rôle.

Who, by the way, was this handsome man, with the rare, low voice that combined refinement and carrying power, so absolutely sure of himself, whose every move betokened the seasoned, accomplished actor, and who displayed to perfection those very graces which John himself hoped some day to exhibit?

In the box in front of Hampstead was another ghostly figure, also watching the rehearsal. John reached forward and touched him on the shoulder, whispering hollowly: "Who is the new leading man?"

"Charles Manning of New York," was the reply; "specially engaged for this and three other rôles."

"Thank you," said John, swallowing hard, for now he understood perfectly the disagreeable meaning of those cajoleries. They represented just one more element in Marien Dounay's calculating life. This New York actor might go back and drop the word that would bring her opportunity, the thing her vaulting ambition coveted more than it coveted love. Therefore she was taking deliberate advantage of these situations to kindle a personal interest in herself, for which, once her object was gained, she would refuse responsibility as heartlessly as she had tried to reject the big man who just now started so violently as he watched her.

Look at that now! The stage direction had required Manning to take Marien in his arms for a minute. Hampstead ground his teeth.

Well, why didn't they separate? What was she clinging to him so long for? Why, indeed, if it were not for this same reason that to John, stewing in jealous rage, seemed despicable and base. This was not nice; it was not womanly; it was not a true reflection of Marien's character. It was, he assured himself hotly, one of the things from which he must save her.

But he had no opportunity to begin his work of salvation that afternoon, for rehearsal ended, Marien walked out with Charles Manning so closely in her company that Hampstead could not so much as catch her eye, and his emotions were in such a riot that he dared not trust himself to accost her.

When John had walked the streets for an hour, with the storm of his feelings rising instead of settling, he resolved upon a note to Marien and went to the office of the Dramatic Review to dispatch it.

"Dear Marien," he wrote. "I must see you to-night. I will call at twelve. JOHN."

The brevity of this communication was deliberately calculated to express his headlong mood and the depths of his determination. He had not asked an answer, but waited for one, assuring himself that if none came he would call just the same. Yet the answer was ominously prompt. John tore it open with brutal strength and saw Marien's handwriting for the first time. It was vigorous and rectangular, but unmistakably feminine, and there was neither salutation nor signature.

"Stupid!" the note began abruptly. "I saw you in the box to-day. I will not have you spying upon me. You must not call. I have tried to make you understand. Why can you not accept the situation? Or are you mad enough to compel me to stage the scene and play it out for you?"

John read the note twice, crumpled it in his hand, and walked slowly down Geary Street to Market and down Market Street to the ferry.

In the second act that night he forgot to take on the knife with which he was to stab his victim, and nearly spoiled the scene, through having to strangle him instead.

"Stage the scene and play it out for you?" What could she mean by that.

Determined to find out, John hurried from the theater at the close of the performance, with his lips pursed stubbornly, and at exactly twelve o'clock Julie was answering his ring at the door of the little apartment on Turk Street.

"Ah!" she exclaimed, smiling cordially. "It is the big man again. No, Madame is not in. She is having supper out to-night. With whom? La! la! I should not tell you that," and Julie shrugged one shoulder only, after a way of hers, and made a movement to close the door; but something in John's eyes induced her to add, with both sympathy and chiding in her tone: "You must not come to see Madame when Madame does not want you."

"But I must see her, Julie!" John pleaded huskily, rather throwing himself upon the mercy of the little French woman.

Julie gazed at him doubtfully. She had fended off the attentions of many an importunate suitor from her beautiful mistress but never one who engaged at once so much of her sympathy and respect as he. In her mind she was weighing something; reflecting perhaps whether it was not kindness to this big, earnest man to let his own eyes serve him. Her decision was evidently in the affirmative.

"If you go quickly to the entrance of Antone's," she suggested hurriedly, "you will see Madame arriving presently in an automobile."

Stubborn as John was in his purpose, he nevertheless flushed that even Julie could think him capable of standing at the door of a French restaurant at midnight waiting to catch a glimpse of the woman he loved in the company of another man. Yet pride was so completely swallowed up in jealousy and passion that another five minutes found him loitering before the entrance to Antone's, resolving to go, to stay; to look and not to look; feeling now weakly ashamed of himself and now meanly resolute.

The place was half underground, with a gilded and illumined entrance that yawned like the mouth of a monster. John was sure from its outward look that Antone's was no more than half respectable. The fragrance of the food which assailed his nostrils was, he felt equally sure, an expensive fragrance. A meal there would cost as much as a week of meals where he was accustomed to take his food. Manning, of course, had a fine salary. He could afford to take Marien for an automobile ride and to Antone's for supper.

Hampstead's envious rage flamed again at this thought, but at the moment the flash of a headlight in his eyes called attention to an automobile just then sweeping in toward the curb. However, instead of the stalwart, graceful figure of Manning, there emerged from the car a squat, oily-faced man, huge of paunch, with thick lips, a heavy nose, pouched cheeks, and small, pig-like eyes, upon whose broad countenance hung an expression of bland self-complaisance. By an odd coincidence, this man was also connected with the stage. John knew him by sight as Gustav Litschi, and by reputation as a very swine among men, utterly without scruple, although endowed with an uncanny business sense; a man who had money and whose theatrical ventures always made money, though often their character was as doubtful as himself.

Disappointed, Hampstead nevertheless experienced a feeling of curiosity as to Litschi's companion, and before drawing back, followed the gross glance of the gimlet eyes within the car to where they rested gloatingly upon a woman in evening clothes, who was gathering her train and cloak about her preparatory to being helped from the car. To John's utter amazement the woman was Marien.

For a moment he stared as if confronted with a specter, then felt his great hands itching while he wavered between a desire to leap upon this coarse creature and tear him to pieces, and the impulse to accost Marien with reproaches and a warning. But the swift reflection that she probably knew the man's character perfectly well prompted John instead to the despicable expedient of deliberately spying upon her. Turning impetuously, he ran quickly down the steps in advance of the couple.

"One?" queried the headwaiter, with a keen estimating glance under which John ordinarily would have felt himself to shrivel; but now a frenzy of jealousy and a sense of outrage had made him bold.

"Yes," he replied brusquely; "that seat yonder in the corner where I can see the whole show."

It was a lonely and undesirable table, smack against the side of the wall, along which ran a row of curtained, box-like alcoves that served as tiny private dining rooms. John could have it and welcome. He got it, and as he turned to sit down, his eye scanned the interior swiftly for Marien and Litschi. To his surprise they were coming straight at him, Marien leading. Certain that she had seen him and was going to address him, John nevertheless determined to await a look of recognition before arising. To his further surprise, no such look came. Coldly, icily beautiful to-night, the glitter in her eyes was hard and desperate, with a suggestion of menace in it, reminding John of that momentary intuition he had once experienced, that this woman could be dangerous. Her note had warned him not to spy upon her, he recalled. It must be that her discovery of his presence had roused a devil in her now. So strong did this feeling become that he felt a relief as great as his surprise when she brushed by as if oblivious of his presence and passed from view into the nearest box, the curtain of which a waiter was holding aside obsequiously.

When the screening curtain dropped, swinging so near that John could have reached across his table and touched it with a hand, he had a sense of sudden escape, as if a tigress, sleekly beautiful and powerfully cruel, had over-leaped him to tear a richer prey beyond. The swine-like Litschi, waddling after her into the box, was the chosen victim. Yonder by the curb John had feared for Marien; now, repulsive as the creature was, he felt a kind of pity for Litschi.

Yet with the curtain drawn, Hampstead's emotion passed swiftly back to love and anxiety for her. She had not seen him, that was all. The supposed look of menace was the product of his imagination and his jealousy.

As the minutes passed unnoted, this anxiety grew again into sympathy and consideration. Marien had complained to him of the hard things she had to do. This supper with Litschi was merely one of them. That scene with Manning was another. He reflected triumphantly that she had not welcomed Litschi to her apartment; but compelled him to bring her to this public place. Poor, brave girl! She had to play with all these men; to warm them without herself getting burnt; to woo them desperately upon the chance: Manning that he might somewhere speak the fortunate word, Litschi that in some greedy hope of gain he might be induced to risk his money on the venture that would give Marien the opportunity for which she had been calculating indomitably for seven years.

But what was that?

John's hand reached out and clutched the table violently, while his body leaned forward as if to rise. What was that she had said so loudly he could hear, and so astonishing that he could not believe his ears?

He had been sitting there such a long, long time, thinking thoughts like these, stirred, soothed, and stirred again by the sound of her voice, heard intermittently between the numbers of the orchestra. He had ordered food and eaten, then ordered more and eaten that,—anything to think and wait, he did not know for what.

Waiters bearing trays had come and gone unceasingly from behind the curtain four feet from his eyes, and he knew that they had borne more bottles than food. Several times he had heard a sound like "shots off-stage." This sound always succeeded the entry of a gold sealed bottle. Evidently they were drinking heavily behind the curtain, Litschi's voice growing lower and less coherent, and Marien's louder and less reserved, till for some time he had been catching little snatches of her conversation. She had been talking about her future, painting a picture of the success she would make when her opportunity came; but now she had said the thing that staggered him.

"What?" he came near to saying aloud; and at the same time he heard the drink-smothered voice of Litschi also with interrogative inflection. Litschi, too, wanted to be sure that he had heard aright.

"I say," iterated the voice of Marien deliberately, as if with calculated carrying power, "that a woman who is ambitious must be prepared to pay the price demanded—her heart, her soul—if need be—herself!"

She plumped out the last word ruthlessly, and broke into a half-tipsy laugh that had in it a suggestion unmistakable as much as to say:

"You understand now, don't you, Gustav Litschi? You realize what I am offering to the man who buys me opportunity?"

Her heart—her soul—herself! Hampstead, having started up, sat down again weakly, the cold sweat of horror standing out upon his brow.

So this was what she had meant all the time in her speech about the calculating life. She could not give herself up to love him or any one, because she was dangling herself as a final lure to the man who would give her opportunity.

"Why, this woman was spiritually—morally—potentially, a—" he could barely let himself think the hateful word. To utter it was impossible.

Perhaps she was worse! A choking, burning sensation was in his throat. He tore at it with his hands, gasping for breath. He wanted to tear at the curtain—at the woman! How he hated her! She had no longer any fineness. She was a coarse, designing, reckless—prostitute! There! In his agony, the word was out. He sent it hurtling across the stage of his own brain. It flew straight. It found its mark upon the face of his love and stuck there blotched and quivering, biting into the picture like acid. It ate out the eyes of Marien Dounay from his mind; it ate away her pliant ruby lips, her cheeks and her soft round chin, and it left of that face only a grinning hideousness from which John Hampstead shrank with a horrible sickness in his heart.

At this moment the curtain rings clicked sharply under the sweep of an impetuous arm, and with the suddenness of an apparition, Marien stood just across the table from him. Her face was highly colored, but the preternatural brightness of the eyes had begun to dull, and there was a loose look, too, about the mouth, the lips of which were curled by a mocking smile.

"Well, John Hampstead!" she sneered, with a vindictive look in her eyes, insinuating scorn in her tones. "Now that I have played out the scene, do you think you understand?"

John had risen stiffly, every fiber of him in riot at the horror he had heard and was now seeing; but his self-control was perfect, and a kind of dignity invested him for the moment.

"Yes," he said, meeting her gaze unflinchingly, "I understand!"

The tone of finality that went into this latter word was unescapable. As it was uttered, Marien attempted one of her lightning changes of manner but failed, breaking instead into a fit of hysterical laughter, during which, with head thrown back, her body swayed, and she disappeared behind the curtain, where the laughter ended abruptly in something like a choke, or a fit of coughing.

But John's indignation and disgust were so great that he did not concern himself as to whether Miss Dounay's laughter might be choking her or not. Embarrassed, too, by the number of eyes turned curiously upon him from the nearer tables where the diners had observed the incident without gathering any of its purport, his only impulse was to pay his bill and escape, before the building and the world came clattering down upon him.

CHAPTER XIV

THE METHOD OF A DREAM

So paralyzing to a man of Hampstead's sensitive nature was the effect of Marien Dounay's startling disclosure that he experienced a partial arrest of consciousness, the symptoms of which hung on surprisingly.

Somehow that night he got back to Oakland, and the next morning was again about his work; but the days went by mechanically—days of risings and retirings, eatings and sleepings, memorizing of lines, mumbling of speeches, sliding into clothes, slipping into grease paint, walkings on and walkings off. Through all of these daily obligations the man moved with a certain absent-minded precision, like a person with a split consciousness, who does not let his right lobe know what his left lobe is thinking.

He knew, for instance, that a telegram came to him one day with the charges collect, and that he paid the charges and signed for the message, but he did not know that the message lay unopened on his dresser while he spent all his unoccupied time sunk in a stupor of meditation upon the thing which had befallen him.

Most astonishing to John was the fact that while he felt rage and humiliation at having so duped himself over Marien Dounay, he had no sense of pain. He was like a man run over by a railroad train who experiences no throb of anguish but only a sickish, numbing sensation in his mangled limbs.

Recognizing that his condition was not normal, Hampstead wondered if he could be going insane. He was eating little; he was taking no interest in his work. He went and came from the theater automatically, impatient of company, impatient of noise, of newspaper headlines, of interruptions of any sort, anxious only to get to his room, to throw himself into a chair or upon a bed, and relapse into a state of mental drooling. After several days he roused from one of these reveries with the clear impression that some presence had been there in the room, had breathed upon him, had touched his lips, and spoken to him. He leaped up and looked about him. He opened the door and scanned the corridor. No one was there,—no echo of corporeal footsteps resounded.

Realizing that it must have been his own dream that waked him, he came back sheepishly and tried again to induce that state of mental dusk in which the odd sensation had been experienced. Soon he roused again with the knowledge that the presence had been with him and had departed; but this time a clear picture of the vision remained. It was a woman,—it was like Marien. It was, he told himself, the image of his Love. He entertained it sadly, like an apparition from the grave. The vision came again, but with repeated visits, its form began to change, until it no longer resembled the form of Marien.

This was exciting; the image might change still further till it definitely resembled some one else.

This surmise proved correct. It did change more and more until identity was for a time completely lost, but as days passed, the features ceased to blur and jumble. The eyes were now constantly blue; the complexion was consistently pink and white; the hair was brown and began to appear crinkly; the lips grew shorter, and of a more youthful red; the chin broadened and appeared fuller and softer. One morning these rosier lips smiled with a rarer spontaneity than the vision had ever shown before, and with the smile came two dimples into the peach-blow cheeks.

"Bessie!" John cried, with a welcoming shout of incoherent joy. "Bessie!"

But his joy was speedily swallowed up in the gloom of mortifying reflections. Could it be that his love was so inconstant as to transfer itself in a few days from Marien Dounay to Bessie Mitchell, and if it did, what was such love worth? Besides, how could he love Bessie as he had loved Marien. There was no fire in her. As yet, she was only a girl. But at this juncture a memory came floating in of that day on the Cliff House rocks, when some vague impulse, which he thought to be sympathy, had made him draw Bessie's face up to his and kiss it. Now, as he recalled it, the touch of her lips was the touch of a woman; and her look that puzzled him then,—why, it was the look of love!

Hampstead leaped up excitedly. Bessie was a woman, and she loved him! And he loved her! But how could he have been such a fool as to think that he loved Marien?