s and secrecy! I've been in it up to the neck
from the first. On your birthday--somehow she's in love with you yet,
Penn--Lord, how does a man do that?--for breakfast she was to show you
the magazine within whose fold is to be found her first literary
lambkin; for luncheon--for you were to spend the day at home--she was
going to give you the check! Generous little beggar, Nell! She said
she had never been able to really give you anything before--she had
only bought with your money and forced upon you things you didn't
want. Then that night after dinner she and I were to act her two-part
play--we've been at it for weeks, tooth and nail, powder and
patches----"

"_You_ and Helen!" gasped Robert.

"Great Scott! who on earth else?--the editor?" laughed Bentnor, little
dreaming what the few words meant to the distraught man before him.
"Perhaps you think I can't do that sort of thing! It's in our blood,
the love of the buskin. The fact is, I've always had my suspicions
that in the time of Charles the Second--well, never mind. We had our
last final farewell dress rehearsal the night you came on here. I tell
you I'm great in it. Helen, to be sure, does fairly well as _Hester
Piozzi_, but wait till you see me as _Mr. Stillingfleet_! You know he
was the fellow whose grayish-blue stockings gave the name for all time
to 'blue-stocking' clubs. He and Dr. Johnson were always buzzing
around the literary women of that day, the pretty D'Arblay, the
dignified Mistress Montague of Portman Square, and the great Piozzi
herself--of course, you remember?"

"Yes, I remember," whispered Robert, his face once more hidden, but a
great peace possessing him. "Ben," he cried, almost joyfully, "what's
the title of Helen's play?"

"_Bas Bleu_," said Bentnor, concealing his triumph at his own tactics
in the lighting of his twenty-third cigarette.

Robert groaned, and his head again drooped in unspeakable humiliation.
And in that moment he made up his mind that no one should ever share
his guilty secret. To make a pathetic appeal to Helen, dwelling upon
his love, his doubts, his torturing jealousy, was one thing; quite
another to tell that hopelessly humorous, refusing-to-be-pathetic
story of those ridiculous _bas bleus_--they dangled everywhere from
every point of his story; flying, pirouetting, circling and
pin-wheeling in a psychic _pas seul_! It was impossible for even a
member of the firm of Flagg, Bentnor & Penn to be impressive. Let them