n him enthusiastically. "Yisso, yisso! See Mis' Tinker,
yisso! You come in, Mis' Tinker. Ve'y so'y. Mis' Potter kassee nobody."

"You mean he'll see Mister Tinker but won't see anybody else?" cried the
playwright.

"Yisso," said Sato, delighted. "Ve'y so'y. Mis' Potter kassee nobody."

"I will see him. I--"

"Wait. It's all right," Tinker reassured him soothingly. "It's all
right, Sato. You go and tell Mr. Potter that I'm here and Mr. Canby came
with me."

"Yisso." Sato stood back from the door obediently, and they passed into
the hall. "You sidowm, please."

"Tell him we're waiting in here," said Tinker, leading the way into the
cream-coloured salon.

"Yisso." Sato disappeared.

The pretty room was exquisitely cheerful, a coal fire burning rosily in
the neat little grate, but for its effect upon Canby it might have been
a dentist's anteroom. He was unable to sit, and began to pace up and
down, shampooing himself with both hands.

"I've racked my brains every step of the way here," he groaned. "All
I could think of was that possibly I've unconsciously paralleled some
other play that I never saw. Maybe someone's told him about a plot like
mine. Such things must happen--they do happen, of course--because
all plots are old. But I can't believe my treatment of it could be so
like--"

"I don't think it's that," said Tinker. "It's never anything you
expect--with him."

"Well, what else can it be?" the playwright demanded. "I haven't done
anything to offend him. What have I done that he should--"

"You'd better sit down," the manager advised him. "Going plumb crazy
never helped anything yet that I know of."

"But, good heavens! How can I--"

"Sh!" whispered Tinker.

A tragic figure made its appearance upon the threshold of the inner
doorway: Potter, his face set with epic woe, gloom burning in his eyes
like the green fire in a tripod at a funeral of state. His plastic hair
hung damp and irregular over his white brow--a wreath upon a tombstone
in the rain--and his garment, from throat to ankle, was a dressing-gown
of dead black, embroidered in purple; soiled, magnificent, awful.
Beneath its midnight border were his bare ankles, final testimony to his
desperate condition, for only in ultimate despair does a suffering man
remove his trousers. The feet themselves were distractedly not of the
tableau, being immersed in bedroom shoes of gay white fur shaped in a
Romeo pattern; but this was the grimmest touch of a