people with whom she had held
converse since the curtain went down upon Arden, seemed unimportant and
indistinct, like courtiers and foresters, not specifically named among
the _dramatis personae_, just put in to fill out and make a more
effective stage setting.

Dick, too, in his room on Greene Street, was wakeful. He sat by the
window far into the night. His heart was heavy within him. The gulf
between him and Tony had suddenly widened immeasureably. She was a real
actress. He hadn't needed a great manager's verdict to teach him that. He
had seen it with his own eyes, heard it with his own ears, felt it with
his own heart. He had worshiped and adored and been made unutterably sad
and lonely by her dazzling success, glad as he was that it had come to
her. Tony would go on in her shining path. He would always lag behind in
the shadows. They would never come together as long as they both lived.
She had started too far ahead. He could never overtake her.

If only there were some way of finding out who he was, get some clue as
to his parentage. He only knew that the man they called Jim, who had
kicked and beaten and sworn at him with foul oaths until he could bear it
no longer, was no kin of his, though the other had claimed the authority
to abuse him as he abused his horses and dogs when drink and ugliness
were upon him. If only he could find Jim again after all these years,
perhaps he could manage to get the truth out of him, find out what the
man knew of himself, and how he had come to be in a circus troupe. Yet
after all, perhaps it was better not to know. The facts might separate
him from Tony even more than he was separated by his ignorance of them.
As it was, he started even, with neither honor nor shame bequeathed him
from the past. What he was, he was in himself. And if by any miracle of
fortune Tony ever did come to care for him it would be just himself,
plain Dick, that she would love. He knew that.

The thought was vaguely comforting and he, too, fell adreaming. Most of
us foiled humans learn to play the game of make-believe and to find such
consolation as we may therein. Often and often in his lonely hours Dick
Carson had summoned Tony Holiday to his side, a Tony as bright and
beautiful and all adorable as the real Tony, but a dream Tony, withal, a
Tony who loved him even as he loved her. And in his make-believe he was
no longer a nameless, impecunious cub reporter, but a man who had arrived
somewhere, made