o occupy your mind during the next act,
try to remember my name."

He slid from his seat and disappeared. Jill clutched at Derek.

"Oh, Derek, it's too awful. I've just been talking to the man who
wrote this play, and I told him it was the worst thing I had ever
seen!"

"Did you?" Derek snorted. "Well, it's about time somebody told him!" A
thought seemed to strike him. "Why, who is he? I didn't know you knew
him."

"I don't. I don't even know his name."

"His name, according to the programme, is John Grant. Never heard of
him before. Jill, I wish you would not talk to people you don't know,"
said Derek with a note of annoyance in his voice. "You can never tell
who they are."

"But...."

"Especially with my mother here. You must be more careful."

The curtain rose. Jill saw the stage mistily. From childhood up, she
had never been able to cure herself of an unfortunate sensitiveness
when sharply spoken to by those she loved. A rebuking world she could
face with a stout heart, but there had always been just one or two
people whose lightest word of censure could crush her. Her father had
always had that effect upon her, and now Derek had taken his place.

But if there had only been time to explain.... Derek could not object
to her chatting with a friend of her childhood, even if she had
completely forgotten him and did not remember his name even now. John
Grant? Memory failed to produce any juvenile John Grant for her
inspection.

Puzzling over this problem, Jill missed much of the beginning of the
second act. Hers was a detachment which the rest of the audience would
gladly have shared. For the poetic drama, after a bad start, was now
plunging into worse depths of dullness. The coughing had become almost
continuous. The stalls, supported by the presence of large droves of
Sir Chester's personal friends, were struggling gallantly to maintain
a semblance of interest, but the pit and gallery had plainly given up
hope. The critic of a weekly paper of small circulation, who had been
shoved up in the upper circle, grimly jotted down the phrase
"apathetically received" on his programme. He had come to the theatre
that night in an aggrieved mood, for managers usually put him in the
dress-circle. He got out his pencil again. Another phrase had occurred
to him, admirable for the opening of his article. "At the Leicester
Theatre," he wrote, "where Sir Chester Portwood presented 'Tried by
Fire,' dullness reigned supreme.