und expression in one vast
whoop. It rang through the empty theatre like the last trump, beating
against the back wall and rising in hollow echoes to the very gallery.
Mr. Bunbury, conversing in low undertones with Mr. Cracknell across the
footlights, shied like a startled mule. There was reproach and menace in
the look he cast at Fillmore, and a minute earlier it would have reduced
that financial magnate to apologetic pulp. But Fillmore was not to
be intimidated now by a look. He strode down to the group at the
footlights,

"Cracknell," he said importantly, "one moment, I should like a word with
you."

CHAPTER VII. SOME MEDITATIONS ON SUCCESS

If actors and actresses are like children in that they are readily
depressed by disaster, they have the child's compensating gift of being
easily uplifted by good fortune. It amazed Sally that any one mortal
should have been able to spread such universal happiness as she had
done by the simple act of lending her brother Fillmore twenty thousand
dollars. If the Millennium had arrived, the members of the Primrose
Way Company could not have been on better terms with themselves. The
lethargy and dispiritedness, caused by their week of inaction, fell from
them like a cloak. The sudden elevation of that creature of the abyss,
the assistant stage manager, to the dizzy height of proprietor of the
show appealed to their sense of drama. Most of them had played in pieces
where much the same thing had happened to the persecuted heroine round
about eleven o'clock, and the situation struck them as theatrically
sound. Also, now that she had gone, the extent to which Miss Hobson had
acted as a blight was universally recognized.

A spirit of optimism reigned, and cheerful rumours became current. The
bowler-hatted Teddy had it straight from the lift-boy at his hotel that
the ban on the theatres was to be lifted on Tuesday at the latest; while
no less an authority than the cigar-stand girl at the Pontchatrain had
informed the man who played the butler that Toledo and Cleveland were
opening to-morrow. It was generally felt that the sun was bursting
through the clouds and that Fate would soon despair of the hopeless task
of trying to keep good men down.

Fillmore was himself again. We all have our particular mode of
self-expression in moments of elation. Fillmore's took the shape of
buying a new waistcoat and a hundred half-dollar cigars and being very
fussy about what he had for lunc