on me!"

He extended his arms behind him, and was enveloped solicitously and
reverently in the garment.

"Confound him!" said Potter good-humouredly, as they came out into the
lobby. "It is chilly; he's usually right, the idiot!"

Turning from Broadway, at the corner, they went over to Fifth Avenue,
where Potter's unconsciousness of the people who recognized and stared
at him was, as usual, one of the finest things he did, either upon the
stage or "off." Superb performance as it was, it went for nothing with
Stewart Canby, who did not even see it, for he walked entranced, not in
a town, but through orchards in bloom.

If Wanda Malone had remained with him, clear and insistent after
yesterday's impersonal vision of her at rehearsal, what was she now,
when every tremulous lilt of the zither-string voice, and every little
gesture of the impulsive hands, and every eager change of the glowing
face, were fresh and living, in all their beautiful reality, but a
matter of minutes past? He no longer resisted the bewitchment; he wanted
all of it. His companions and himself were as trees walking, and when
they had taken their seats at a table in the men's restaurant of a hotel
where he had never been, he was not roused from his rapturous apathy
even by the conduct of probably the most remarkable maitre d'hotel in
the world.

"You don't git 'em!" said this personage briefly, when Potter had
ordered chops and "oeufs a la creole" and lettuce salad, from a card.
"You got to eat partridge and asparagus tips salad!"

And he went away, leaving the terrible Potter resigned and unrebellious.

The partridge was undeniable when it came; a stuffed man would have
eaten it. But Talbot Potter and his two guests did little more than
nibble it; they neither ate nor talked, and yet they looked anything
but unhappy. Detached from their surroundings, as they sat over
their coffee, they might have been taken to be three poetic gentlemen
listening to a serenade.

After a long and apparently satisfactory silence, Talbot Potter looked
at his watch, but not, as it proved, to see if it was time to return to
the theatre, his ensuing action being to send a messenger to procure
a fresh orchid to take the place of the one that had begun to droop a
little from his buttonhold. He attached the new one with an attentive
gravity shared by his companions.

"Good thing, a boutonniere," he explained. "Lighten it up a little.
Rehearsal's dry work, usually. Th