it in exactly with the character of Hubert. Shall
we--transfer----?' His pencil waved in the air....

'Heavenly powers!' Mr. Pilgrim hoarsely murmured, as they attained the
curtain of Act III., 'it's four o'clock. And I had an appointment for
lunch at two. But I never think of food when I am working. Never!'

Henry, however, had not broken his fast since the previous evening.

The third and the greatest crisis in the unparalleled popularity of
Henry Shakspere Knight began to prepare itself. The rumour of its
coming was heard afar off, and every literary genius in England and
America who was earning less than ten thousand pounds a year ground his
teeth and clenched his hands in impotent wrath. The boom and resounding
of _The Plague-Spot_ would have been deafening and immense in any case;
but Henry had an idea, and executed it, which multiplied the
advertisement tenfold. It was one of those ideas, at once quite simple
and utterly original, which only occur to the favourites of the gods.

The serial publication of _The Plague-Spot_ finished in June, and it had
been settled that the book should be issued simultaneously in England
and America in August. Now, that summer John Pilgrim was illuminating
the provinces, and he had fixed a definite date, namely, the tenth of
October, for the reopening of Prince's Theatre with the dramatic version
of _The Plague-Spot_. Henry's idea was merely to postpone publication of
the book until the production of the play. Mark Snyder admitted himself
struck by the beauty of this scheme, and he made a special journey to
America in connection with it, a journey which cost over a hundred
pounds. The result was an arrangement under which the book was to be
issued in London and New York, and the play to be produced by John
Pilgrim at Prince's Theatre, London, and by Lionel Belmont at the
Madison Square Theatre, New York, simultaneously on one golden date.

The splendour of the conception appealed to all that was fundamental in
the Anglo-Saxon race.

John Pilgrim was a finished master of advertisement, but if any man in
the wide world could give him lessons in the craft, that man was Lionel
Belmont. Macalistairs, too, in their stately, royal way, knew how to
impress facts upon, the public.

Add to these things that Geraldine bore twins, boys.

No earthly power could have kept those twins out of the papers, and
accordingly they had their share in the prodigious, unsurpassed and
unforgettabl